A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 Part 10

At the order of the judge she was questioned by a clergyman and two justices of the peace, who found that she had been coached to tell her story by a Master Thompson, alias Southworth, a "seminarie priest." So ended the charges against the Salmesbury witches.

One would suppose that this verdict might have turned the tide in the other cases. But the evidence, as Potts is careful to show, lest the reader should draw a wrong conclusion, was of very different character in the other trials. They were all finished on the third day of court and turned over to the jury. Five of the accused, exclusive of those at Salmesbury, were acquitted, one condemned to a year's imprisonment, and ten sentenced to death. To this number should be added Jennet Preston, who had in the preceding month been tried at York for the killing of a Mr. Lister, and who was named by the Lancaster witnesses as one of the gang at Malking Tower.

So ended the Lancashire trials of 1612. The most remarkable event of the sort in James's reign, they were clearly the outcome of his writings and policy. Potts asks pointedly: "What hath the King's Maiestie written and published in his Daemonologie by way of premonition and prevention, which hath not here by the first or last beene executed, put in practice, or discovered?"

Our second group of cases includes those where convulsive and "possessed" persons had started the alarm. The Northampton, Leicester, and Lichfield cases were all instances in point. The last two, however, may be omitted here because they will come up in another connection. The affair at Northampton in 1612, just a month earlier than the Lancashire affair, merits notice. Elizabeth Belcher and her brother, "Master Avery," were the disturbing agents. Mistress Belcher had long been suffering with an illness that baffled diagnosis. It was suggested to her that the cause was witchcraft. A list of women reputed to be witches was repeated to her. The name of Joan Brown seemed to impress her. "Hath shee done it?" she asked.[12] The name was repeated to her and from that time she held Joan guilty.[13] Joan and her mother were shut up.

Meantime Master Avery began to take fits and to aid his sister in making accusation. Between them they soon had accused six women for their afflictions. The stir brought to the surface the hidden suspicions of others. There was a witch panic and the justices of the peace[14]

scurried hither and thither till they had fourteen witches locked up in Northampton. When the trial came off at Northampton, Master Avery was the hero. He re-enacted the role of the Throckmorton children at Warboys with great success. When he came to court--he came in a "coch"--he was at once stricken with convulsions. His torments in court were very convincing. It is pleasant to know that when he came out of his seizure he would talk very "discreetly, christianly, and charitably." Master Avery was versatile, however. His evidence against the women rested by no means alone on his seizures. He had countless apparitions in which he saw the accused;[15] he had been mysteriously thrown from a horse; strangest of all, he had foretold at a certain time that if any one should go down to the gaol and listen to the voices of the witches, he could not understand a word. Whereupon a Master of Arts of Trinity College, Oxford, went off to the prison at the uncanny hour of two in the morning and "heard a confused noise of much chattering and chiding, but could not discover a ready word."

Master Avery had a great deal more to tell, but the jury seem not to have fully credited him.[16] They convicted Joan Brown and her mother, however, on the charges of Elizabeth and her brother. Three others were found guilty upon other counts. None of them, so far as the records go, and the records were careful on this point, admitted any guilt.[17] The one young man among those who were hanged bitterly resisted his conviction from the beginning and died declaring that authority had turned to tyranny. He might well feel so. His father and mother had both been tortured by the water ordeal, and his mother had been worried till she committed suicide in prison.

This brings us to the third sort of cases, those that were the outcome of quarrels or grudges. It has already been observed that the Lancashire affair could very well be reckoned under this heading. It is no exaggeration to say that a goodly percentage of all other witch trials in the reign of James could be cla.s.sified in the same way. Most notable among them was the famous trial of the Belvoir witches at Lincoln in 1618-1619. The trial has received wide notice because it concerned a leading family--perhaps the wealthiest in England--the great Catholic family of Manners, of which the Earl of Rutland was head. The effort to account for the mysterious illness of his young heir and for that which had a few years earlier carried off the boy's elder brother led to a charge of witchcraft against three humble women of the neighborhood. The Rutland affair shows how easily a suspicion of witchcraft might involve the fortunes of the lowly with those of the great. Joan Flower and her two daughters had been employed as charwomen in Belvoir Castle, the home of the Rutlands. One of the daughters, indeed, had been put in charge of "the poultrey abroad and the washhouse within dores." But this daughter seems not to have given satisfaction to the countess in her work, some other causes of disagreement arose which involved Mother Flower, and both Mother Flower and her daughter were sent away from the castle. This was the beginning of the trouble. Mother Flower "cursed them all that were the cause of this discontentment." Naturally little heed was paid to her grumblings. Such things were common enough and it did not even occur to any one, when the eldest son of the earl sickened and died, that the event was in any way connected with the malice of the Flowers.

It was not until about five years later, when the younger son Francis fell sick of an illness to prove fatal, that suspicion seems to have lighted upon the three women.[18] The circ.u.mstances that led to their discharge were then recalled and along with them a ma.s.s of idle gossip and scandal against the women. It was remembered that Mother Joan was "a monstrous malicious woman, full of oathes, curses, and imprecations irreligious." Some of her neighbors "dared to affirme that she dealt with familiar spirits, and terrified them all with curses and threatning of revenge." At length, in February of 1618/19, on the return of the earl from attending His Majesty "both at Newmarket before Christmas and at Christmas at Whitehall," the women were fetched before justices of the peace, who bound them over to the a.s.sizes at Lincoln. Mother Flower died on the way to Lincoln, but the two daughters were tried there before Sir Edward Bromley, who had been judge at the Lancashire trials, and before Sir Henry Hobart. The women made a detailed confession of weird crimes. There were tales of gloves belonging to the two young sons of the earl, gloves that had been found in uncanny places and had been put in hot water and rubbed upon Rutterkin the cat--or spirit. There were worse stories that will not bear repet.i.tion. Needless to say, Margaret and Philippa Flower were convicted and hanged.[19]

The Rutland cases have been used to ill.u.s.trate how the witch accusation might arise out of a grudge or quarrel. There were three or four other cases that ill.u.s.trate this origin of the charge. The first is that of Johanna Harrison--she has been mentioned in the previous chapter--who had an "altercation" with a neighbor. Of course she threatened him, he fell ill, and he scratched her.[20] But here the commonplace tale takes a new turn. She had him arrested and was awarded five shillings damages and her costs of suit. No wonder the man fell sick again. Perhaps--but this cannot be certain--it was the same man who was drinking his ale one day with his fellows when she entered and stood "gloating" over him. He turned and said, "Doe you heare, Witch, looke tother waies." The woman berated him with angry words, and, feeling ill the next morning--he had been drinking heavily the night before--he dragged her off to the justice. A few weeks later she and her daughter were hanged at Hertford.[21]

The story of Mother Sutton and Master Enger has been referred to in several connections, but it will bear telling in narrative form. Mother Sutton was a poor tenant of Master Enger's, "a gentleman of worship,"

who often bestowed upon her "food and cloathes." On account of her want she had been chosen village "hog-heard," and had for twenty years fulfilled the duties of her office "not without commendations." But it happened that she quarreled one day with her benefactor, and then his difficulties began. The tale is almost too trivial for repet.i.tion, but is nevertheless characteristic. Master Enger's servants were taking some corn to market, when they met "a faire black sowe" grazing. The wayward beast began turning round "as readily as a Windmill sail at worke; and as sodainly their horses fell to starting and drawing some one way, some another." They started off with the cart of corn, but broke from it and ran away. The servants caught them and went on to Bedford with the load.

But the sow followed. When the corn had been sold, one of the servants went home, the other stayed with his "boone companions." When he rode home later, he found the sow grazing outside of town. It ran by his side, and the horses ran away again. But the servants watched the sow and saw it enter Mother Sutton's house. Master Enger made light of the story when it was told to him, and, with remarkable insight for a character in a witch story, "supposed they were drunke." But a few days later the same servant fell into conversation with Mother Sutton, when a beetle came and struck him. He fell into a trance, and then went home and told his master. The next night the servant said that Mary Sutton entered his room--the vision we have already described.[22]

The rest of the story the reader knows from the last chapter. Mother Sutton and her daughter were put to various ordeals and at length hanged. Doubtless the imaginative servant, who had in some way, perhaps, been involved in the original quarrel, gained favor with his master, and standing in the community.[23]

The tale of the Bakewell witches is a very curious one and, though not to be confidently depended upon, may suggest how it was possible to avail oneself of superst.i.tion in order to repay a grudge. A Scotchman staying at a lodging-house in Bakewell fell in debt to his landlady, who retained some of his clothes as security. He went to London, concealed himself in a cellar, and was there found by a watchman, who arrested him for being in an unoccupied house with felonious intent. He professed to be dazed and declared that he was at Bakewell in Derbyshire at three o'clock that morning. He explained it by the fact that he had repeated certain words which he had heard his lodging-house keeper and her sister say. The judge was amazed, the man's depositions were taken down, and he was sent to the justices of Derby.

All that we really know about the Bakewell affair is that several witches probably suffered death there in 1607. A local antiquarian has given this tale of how the alarm started.[24] While it is unlike any other narrative of witchcraft, it is not necessarily without foundation.

The reader has doubtless observed that the cases which we have been describing occurred, all of them with one exception, between 1603 and 1619. In discussing the matter of the distribution of witchcraft in the last chapter we noted that not only executions for the crime, but even accusations and indictments, were nearly altogether limited to the first fifteen years of James's rule. If it is true that there was a rather sudden falling off of prosecution in the reign of the zealous James, the fact merits explanation. Fortunately the explanation is not far to seek.

The king's faith in the verity of many of the charges made against witches had been rudely shaken. As a matter of fact there had always been a grain of skepticism in his make-up. This had come out even before he entered England. In 1597 he had become alarmed at the spread of trials in Scotland and had revoked all the commissions then in force for the trial of the offence.[25] At the very time when he became king of England, there were special circ.u.mstances that must have had weight with him. Throughout the last years of Elizabeth's reign there had been, as we have seen, a morbid interest in demoniacal possession, an interest to which sensation-mongers were quickly minded to respond. We saw that at the end of the sixteenth century the Anglican church stepped in to put down the exorcizing of spirits,[26] largely perhaps because it had been carried on by Catholics and by a Puritan clergyman. Yet neither Harsnett's book nor Darrel's imprisonment quite availed to end a practice which offered at all times to all comers a path to notoriety.

James had not been on the English throne a year when he became interested in a case of this kind. Mary Glover, a girl alleged to have been bewitched by a Mother Jackson, was at the king's wish examined by a skilled physician, Dr. Edward Jorden, who recognized her fits as disease, brought the girl to a confession, published an account of the matter, and so saved the life of the woman whom she had accused.[27]

In the very next year there was a case at Cambridge that gained royal notice. It is not easy to straighten out the facts from the letters on the matter, but it seems that two Cambridge maids had a curious disease suggesting bewitchment.[28] A Franciscan and a Puritan clergyman were, along with others, suspected. The matter was at once referred to the king and the government. James directed that examinations be made and reported to him. This was done. James wormed out of the "princ.i.p.al" some admission of former dealing with conjuration, but turned the whole thing over to the courts, where it seems later to have been established that the disease of the bewitched maidens was "naturall."

These were but the first of several impostures that interested the king.

A girl at Windsor, another in Hertfordshire, were possessed by the Devil,[29] two maids at Westminster were "in raptures from the Virgin Mary and Michael the Archangel,"[30] a priest of Leicestershire was "possessed of the Blessed Trinity."[31] Such cases--not to mention the Grace Sowerb.u.t.ts confessions at Lancaster that were like to end so tragically--were the excrescences of an intensely religious age. The reader of early colonial diaries in America will recognize the resemblance of these to the wonders they report. James took such with extreme seriousness.[32] The possessed person was summoned to court for exhibition, or the king went out of his way to see him. It is a matter of common information that James prided himself on his cleverness.

Having succeeded in detecting certain frauds, he became an expert detective. In one instance "he ordered it so that a proper courtier made love to one of these bewitched maids"[33] and soon got her over her troubles. In another case a woman "strangely affected" by the first verse of John's Gospel failed to recognize it when read in Greek,[34]

proof positive that the omniscient Devil did not possess her.

Three instances of exposure of imposture were most notable, those of Grace Sowerb.u.t.ts, the boy at Leicester, and the "Boy of Bilston." The first of these has already been sufficiently discussed in connection with the Lancashire trials. The second had nothing remarkable about it.

A twelve or thirteen-year-old boy had fits which he said were caused by spirits sent by several women whom he accused as witches. Nine women were hanged, while six more were under arrest and would probably have met the same end, had not the king in his northward progress, while stopping at Leicester, detected the shamming.[35] Whether or no the boy was punished we are not told. It is some satisfaction that the judges were disgraced.[36]

The boy of Bilston was, if Webster may be believed,[37] the most famous, if not the most successful, fraud of all. The case was heralded over the entire realm and thousands came to see. The story is almost an exact duplicate of earlier narratives of possession. A thirteen-year-old boy of Bilston in Staffordshire, William Perry, began to have fits and to accuse a Jane Clarke, whose presence invariably made him worse. He "cast out of his mouth rags, thred, straw, crooked pins." These were but single deceptions in a repertoire of varied tricks. Doubtless he had been trained in his role by a Roman priest. At any rate the Catholics tried exorcism upon him, but to no purpose. Perhaps some Puritans experimented with cures which had like result.[38] The boy continued his spasms and his charges against the witch and she was brought into court at the July a.s.sizes. But Bishop Morton,[39] before whose chancellor the boy had first been brought, was present, and the judges turned the boy over to him for further investigation.[40] Then, with the help of his secretary, he set about to test the boy, and readily exposed his deception--in most curious fashion too. The boy, like one we have met before, could not endure the first verse of John's Gospel, but failed to recognize it when read in the Greek. After that he was secretly watched and his somewhat elaborate preparations for his pretences were found out. He was persuaded to confess his trickery in court before Sir Peter Warburton and Sir Humphrey Winch, "and the face of the County and Country there a.s.sembled,"[41] as well as to beg forgiveness of the women whom he had accused.

It will be seen that the records of imposture were well on their way to rival the records of witchcraft, if not in numbers, at least in the notice that they received. And the king who had so bitterly arraigned Reginald Scot was himself becoming the discoverer-general of England.[42] It is not, then, without being forewarned that we read Fuller's remarkable statement about the king's change of heart. "The frequency of such forged possessions wrought such an alteration upon the judgement of King James that he, receding from what he had written in his 'Daemonology,' grew first diffident of, and then flatly to deny, the workings of witches and devils, as but falsehoods and delusions."[43] In immediate connection with this must be quoted what Francis...o...b..rne has to say.[44] He was told, he writes, that the king would have gone as far as to deny any such operations, but out of reasons of state and to gratify the church.[45]

Such a conversion is so remarkable that we could wish we had absolutely contemporary statements of it. As a matter of fact, the statements we have quoted establish nothing more than a probability, but they certainly do establish that. Fuller, the church historian, responsible for the first of the two statements, was a student in Queen's College[46] at Cambridge during the last four years of James's reign; Osborne was a man of thirty-two when the king died, and had spent a part of his young manhood at the court. Their testimony was that of men who had every opportunity to know about the king's change of opinion.[47] In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, we must accept, at least provisionally, their statements.[48] And it is easier to do so in view of the marked falling off of prosecutions that we have already noted. This indeed is confirmation of a negative sort; but we have one interesting bit of affirmative proof, the outcome of the trials at York in 1622. In that year the children of Mr. Edward Fairfax, a member of the historic Fairfax family of Yorkshire, were seized with some strange illness, in which they saw again and again the spectres of six different women. These women were examined by the justices of the peace and committed to the a.s.sizes.[49] In the mean time they had found able and vigorous defenders in the community. What happened at the April a.s.sizes we no not know, but we know that four of the women were released, two of them on bond.[50] This was probably a compromise method of settling the matter. Fairfax was not satisfied. Probably through his influence the women were again brought up at the August a.s.sizes.[51]

Then, at least, as we know beyond a doubt, they were formally tried, this time upon indictments preferred by Fairfax himself.[52] The judge warned the jury to be very careful, and, after hearing some of the evidence, dismissed the women on the ground that the evidence "reached not to the point of the statute."[53] This seems significant. A man of a well known county family was utterly baffled in pressing charges in a case where his own children were involved.[54] It looks as if there were judges who were following the king's lead in looking out for imposture.[55] In any case there was, in certain quarters, a public sentiment against the conviction of witches, a sentiment that made itself felt. This we shall have occasion to note again in following out the currents and fluctuations of opinions.

[1] Of course the proof that some of the accused really made pretensions to magic rests upon their own confessions and their accusations of one another, and might be a part of an intricate tissue of falsehood. But, granting for the moment the absolute untrustworthiness of the confessions and accusations there are incidental statements which imply the practice of magic. For example, Elizabeth Device's young daughter quoted a long charm which she said her mother had taught her and which she hardly invented on the spur of the moment. And Demdike was requested to "amend a sick cow."

[2] The gunpowder plot, seven years earlier, no doubt gave direction to this plan, or, perhaps it would be better to say, gave the idea to those who confessed the plan.

[3] James Crossley seems to believe that there was "some scintilla of truth" behind the story. See his edition of Potts, notes, p. 40.

[4] Among those who never confessed seems to have been Chattox's daughter, Anne Redfearne.

[5] See above, p. 116.

[6] It is a satisfaction to know that Alice died "impenitent," and that not even her children could "move her to confesse."

[7] See above, pp. 112-113, and Potts, Q-Q verso.

[8] See Potts, I.

[9] It can hardly be doubted that the children had been thoroughly primed with the stories in circulation against their mother.

[10] Other witnesses charged her with "many strange practises."

[11] The principle that a man's life may not twice be put in jeopardy for the same offence had been pretty well established before 1612. See Darly's Case, 25 Eliz. (1583), c.o.ke's _Reports_ (ed. Thomas and Fraser, London, 1826), IV, f. 40; Vaux's Case, 33 Eliz. (1591), _ibid._, f. 45; Wrote _vs._ Wiggs, 33 Eliz. (1591), _ibid._, f. 47. This principle had been in process of development for several centuries. See Bracton (ed.

Sir Travers Twiss, London, 1878-1883), II, 417, 433, 437; Britton (ed.

F. M. Nichols, Oxford, 1865), bk. I, cap. xxiv, 5, f. 44 b.

It must be noted, however, that the statute of 3 Hen. VII, cap. II, provides that indictments shall be proceeded in, immediately, at the king's suit, for the death of a man, without waiting for bringing an appeal; and that the plea of _antefort acquit_ in an indictment shall be no bar to the prosecuting of an appeal. This law was pa.s.sed to get around special legal inconvenience and related only to homicide and to the single case of prosecution by appeal. In general, then, we may say that the former-jeopardy doctrine was part of the common law, (1) an appeal of felony being a bar to subsequent appeal or indictment, (2) an indictment a bar to a subsequent indictment, and (3) an indictment to a subsequent appeal, except so far as the statute of 3 Hen. VII., cap. II, changed the law as respects homicides. For this brief statement I am indebted to Professor William Underhill Moore of the University of Wisconsin.

What Potts has to say about Anne Redfearne's case hardly enables us to reach a conclusion about the legal aspect of it.

[12] This is the story in the MS. account (Brit. Mus., Sloane, 972). The printed narrative of the origin of the affair is somewhat different.

Joan had on one occasion been struck by Mistress Belcher for unbecoming behavior and had cherished a grudge. No doubt this was a point recalled against Joan after suspicion had been directed against her.

[13] In John Cotta's _The Triall of Witchcraft ..._ (London, 1616), 66-67, there is a very interesting statement which probably refers to this case. Cotta, it will be remembered, was a physician at Northampton.

He wrote: "There is a very rare, but true, description of a Gentlewoman, about sixe yeares past, cured of divers kinds of convulsions, ... After she was almost cured, ... but the cure not fully accomplished, it was by a reputed Wisard whispered ... that the Gentlewoman was meerely bewitched, supposed Witches were accused and after executed.... In this last past seventh yeare ... fits are critically again returned." Cotta says six years ago and the Northampton trials were in 1612, four years before. It is quite possible, however, that Mistress Belcher began to be afflicted in 1610.

[14] One of these was Sir Gilbert Pickering of Tichmarsh, almost certainly the Gilbert Pickering mentioned as an uncle of the Throckmorton children at Warboys. See above, pp. 47-48. His hatred of witches had no doubt been increased by that affair.

[15] See what is said of spectral evidence in chapter V, above.

[16] At least there is no evidence that Alice Abbott, Catherine Gardiner, and Alice Harris, whom he accused, were punished in any way.

[17] It seems, however, that Arthur Bill, while he st.u.r.dily denied guilt, had been before trapped into some sort of an admission. He had "unawares confest that he had certaine spirits at command." But this may mean nothing more than that something he had said had been grossly misinterpreted.

[18] Three women of Leicestershire, Anne Baker, Joan Willimot, and Ellen Greene, who in their confessions implicated the Flowers (they belonged to parishes neighbor to that of Belvoir, which lies on the shire border) and whose testimony against them figured in their trials, were at the same time (Feb.-March, 1618/19) under examination in that county.

Whether these women were authors or victims of the Belvoir suspicions we do not know. As we have their d.a.m.ning confessions, there is small doubt as to their fate.

[19] The women were tried in March, 1618/19. Henry, the elder son of the earl, was buried at Bottesford, September 26, 1613. John Nichols, _History and Antiquities of the County of Leicester_ (London, 1795-1815), II, pt. i, 49, note 10. Francis, the second, lingered till early in 1620. His sister, Lady Katherine, whose delicate health had also been ascribed to the witches, was now the heiress, and became in that year the bride of Buckingham, the king's favorite. There is one aspect of this affair that must not be overlooked. The accusation against the Flowers cannot have been unknown to the king, who was a frequent visitor at the seat of the Rutlands. It is hard to believe that under such circ.u.mstances the use of torture, which James had declared essential to bring out the guilt of the accused witches, was not after some fashion resorted to. The weird and uncanny confessions go far towards supporting such an hypothesis.

[20] _The Most Cruell and b.l.o.o.d.y Murther committed by ... Annis Dell, ... with the severall Witch-crafts ... of one Johane Harrison and her Daughter_, 63.

[21] This story must be accepted with hesitation; see below, appendix A, --3.