A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 Part 12

The third woman to be examined by the bishop was a widow of sixty, who had not been numbered among the original seventeen witches. She acknowledged that she was a witch, but was, wrote the bishop, "more often faulting in the particulars of her actions as one having a strong imagination of the former, but of too weak a memory to retain or relate the latter." The woman told a commonplace story of a man in black attire who had come to her six years before and made the usual contract. But very curiously she could name only one other witch, and professed to know none of those already in gaol.

Such were the results of the examinations sent in by the bishop. In the letter which he sent along, he expressed doubt about the whole matter.

"Conceit and malice," he wrote, "are so powerful with many in those parts that they will easily afford an oath to work revenge upon their neighbour." He would, he intimated, have gone further in examining the counter charges brought by the accused, had it not been that he hesitated to proceed against the king, that is, the prosecution.

This report doubtless confirmed the fears of the government. The writs to the sheriff of Lancaster were redirected, and four of the women were brought up to London and carried to the "s.h.i.+p Tavern" at Greenwich, close to one of the royal residences.[19] Two of His Majesty's surgeons, Alexander Baker and Sir William Knowles, the latter of whom was accustomed to examine candidates for the king's touch, together with five other surgeons and ten certificated midwives, were now ordered to make a bodily examination of the women, under the direction of the eminent Harvey,[20] the king's physician, who was later to discover the circulation of the blood. In the course of this chapter we shall see that Harvey had long cherished misgivings about witchcraft. Probably by this time he had come to disbelieve it. One can but wonder if Charles, already probably aware of Harvey's views, had not intended from his first step in the Lancas.h.i.+re case to give his physician a chance to a.s.sert his opinion. In any case his report and that of his subordinates was entirely in favor of the women, except that in the case of Margaret Johnson (who had confessed) they had found a mark, but one to which they attached little significance.[21] The women seem to have been carried before the king himself.[22] We do not know, however, that he expressed any opinion on the matter.

The whole affair has one aspect that has been entirely overlooked.

Whatever the verdict of the privy council and of the king may have been--and it was evidently one of caution--they gave authorization from the highest quarters for the use of the test of marks on the body. That proof of witchcraft had been long known in England and had slowly won its way into judicial procedure until now it was recognized by the highest powers in the kingdom. To be sure, it was probably their purpose to annul the reckless convictions in Lancas.h.i.+re, and to break down the evidence of the female juries; but in doing so they furnished a precedent for the witch procedure of the civil-war period.

In the mean time, while the surgeons and midwives were busy over these four women, the Robinsons, father and son, had come to London at the summons of the privy council.[23] There the boy was separated from his father. To a Middles.e.x justice of the peace appointed by Secretary Windebank to take his statements he confessed that his entire story was an invention and had no basis of fact whatever.[24] Both father and son were imprisoned and proceedings seem to have been inst.i.tuted against them by one of the now repentant jurymen who had tried the case.[25] How long they were kept in prison we do not know.

One would naturally suppose that the women would be released on their return to Lancaster, but the sheriff's records show that two years later there were still nine witches in gaol.[26] Three of them bore the same names as those whom Robinson pretended to have seen at h.o.a.rstones. At least one other of the nine had been convicted in 1634, probably more.

Margaret Johnson, the single one to confess, so far as we know, was not there. She had probably died in prison in the mean time. We have no clue as to why the women were not released. Perhaps public sentiment at home made the sheriff unwilling to do it, perhaps the wretched creatures spent two or more years in prison--for we do not know when they got out--as a result of judicial negligence, a negligence of which there are too many examples in the records of the time. More likely the king and the privy council, while doubting the charges against the women, had been reluctant to antagonize public sentiment by declaring them innocent.

It is disagreeable to have to state that Lancaster was not yet through with its witches. Early in the next year the Bishop of Chester was again called upon by the privy council to look into the cases of four women.

There was some delay, during which a dispute took place between the bishop and the sheriff as to where the bishop should examine the witches, whether at Wigan, as he proposed, or at Lancaster.[27] One suspects that the civil authorities of the Duchy of Lancaster may have resented the bishop's part in the affair. When Bridgeman arrived in Lancaster he found two of the women already dead. Of the other two, the one, he wrote, was accused by a man formerly "distracted and lunatic"

and by a woman who was a common beggar; the other had been long reputed a witch, but he saw no reason to believe it. He had, he admitted, found a small lump of flesh on her right ear.[28] Alas that the Bishop of Chester, like the king and the privy council, however much he discounted the accusations of witchcraft, had not yet wholly rid himself of one of the darkest and most disagreeable forms of the belief that the Evil One had bodily communication with his subjects.

In one respect the affair of 1633-1634 in northern England was singular.

The social and moral character of those accused was distinctly high. Not that they belonged to any but the peasant cla.s.s, but that they represented a good type of farming people. Frances d.i.c.konson's husband evidently had some property. Mary Spencer insisted that she was accustomed to go to church and to repeat the sermon to her parents, and that she was not afraid of death, for she hoped it would make an entrance for her into heaven. Margaret Johnson was persuaded that a man and his wife who were in the gaol on Robinson's charges were not witches, because the man "daily prays and reads and seems a G.o.dly man."

With this evidence of religious life, which must have meant something as to the status of the people in the community, should be coupled the entire absence of stories of threats at beggars and of quarrels between bad-tempered and loose-lived women, stories that fill so many dreary pages of witchcraft records. Nor is there any mention of the practice of pretended magic.

In previous chapters we have had occasion to observe the continuity of superst.i.tion in certain localities. It is obvious that Lancas.h.i.+re offers one of the best ill.u.s.trations of that principle. The connection between the alarms of 1612 and 1633-1634 is not a matter of theory, but can be established by definite proof. It is perhaps not out of order to inquire, then, why Lancas.h.i.+re should have been so infested with witches. It is the more necessary when we consider that there were other witch cases in the country. Nicholas Starchie's children gave rise to the first of the scares. It seems likely that a certain Utley was hanged at Lancaster in 1630 for bewitching a gentleman's child.[29] During Commonwealth days, as we shall find, there was an alarm at Lancaster that probably cost two witches their lives. No county in England except Ess.e.x had a similar record. No explanation can be offered for the records of these two counties save that both had been early infected with a hatred of witches, and that the witches came to be connected, in tradition, with certain localities within the counties and with certain families living there. This is, indeed, an explanation that does not explain. It all comes back to the continuity of superst.i.tion.

We have already referred to the widespread interest in the Lancas.h.i.+re witches. There are two good ill.u.s.trations of this interest. When Sir William Brereton was travelling in Holland in June of 1634, a little while before the four women had been brought to London, he met King Charles's sister, the Queen of Bohemia, and at once, apparently, they began to talk about the great Lancas.h.i.+re discovery.[30] The other instance of comment on the case was in England. It is one which shows that playwrights were quite as eager then as now to be abreast of current topics. Before final judgment had been given on the Lancas.h.i.+re women, Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome, well known dramatists, had written a play on the subject which was at once published and "acted at the Globe on the Bankside by His Majesty's Actors." By some it has been supposed that this play was an older play founded on the Lancas.h.i.+re affair of 1612 and warmed over in 1634; but the main incidents and the characters of the play are so fully copied from the depositions of the young Robinson and from the charges preferred against Mary Spencer, Frances d.i.c.konson, and Margaret Johnson, that a layman would at once p.r.o.nounce it a play written entirely to order from the affair of 1634.

Nothing unique in the stories was left out. The pail incident--of course without its rational explanation--was grafted into the play and put upon the stage. Indeed, a marriage that afforded the hook upon which to hang a bundle of indecencies, and the story of a virtuous husband who discovers his wife to be a witch, were the only added motives of importance. For our purpose the significance of the play lies of course in its testimony to the general interest--the people of London were obviously familiar with the details, even, of the charges--and its probable reflection of London opinion about the case. Throughout the five acts there were those who maintained that there were no witches, a recognition of the existence of such an opinion. Of course in the play they were all, before the curtain fell, convinced of their error. The authors, who no doubt catered to public sentiment, were not as earnest as the divines of their day, but they were almost as superst.i.tious.

Heywood showed himself in another work, _The Hierarchie of the Blessed Angels_,[31] a sincere believer in witchcraft and backed his belief by the Warboys case. Probably he had read Scot, but he was not at all the type of man to set himself against the tide. _The late Lancas.h.i.+re Witches_ no doubt expressed quite accurately London opinion. It was written, it will be remembered, before the final outcome of the case could be foreseen. Perhaps Heywood foresaw it, more probably he was sailing close to the wind of opinion when he wrote in the epilogue,

... "Perhaps great mercy may, After just condemnation, give them day Of longer life."

It is easy in discussing the Lancas.h.i.+re affair to miss a central figure.

Frances d.i.c.konson, Mary Spencer, and the others, could they have known it, owed their lives in all probability to the intellectual independence of William Harvey. There is a precious story about Harvey in an old ma.n.u.script letter by an unknown writer, that, if trustworthy, throws a light on the physician's conduct in the case. The letter seems to have been written by a justice of the peace in southwestern England about 1685.[32] He had had some experience with witches--we have mentioned them in another connection--and he was prompted by them to tell a story of Dr. Harvey, with whom he was "very familiarly acquainted." "I once asked him what his opinion was concerning witchcraft; whether there was any such thing. Hee told mee he believed there was not." Asked the reasons for his doubt, Harvey told him that "when he was at Newmercat with the King [Charles I] he heard there was a woman who dwelt at a lone house on the borders of the Heath who was reputed a Witch, that he went alone to her, and found her alone at home.... Hee said shee was very distrustful at first, but when hee told her he was a vizard, and came purposely to converse with her in their common trade, then shee easily believed him; for say'd hee to mee, 'You know I have a very magicall face.'" The physician asked her where her familiar was and desired to see him, upon which she brought out a dish of milk and made a chuckling noise, as toads do, at which a toad came from under the chest and drank some of the milk. Harvey now laid a plan to get rid of the woman. He suggested that as fellow witches they ought to drink together, and that she procure some ale. She went out to a neighboring ale-house, half a mile away, and Harvey availed himself of her absence to take up the toad and cut it open. Out came the milk. On a thorough examination he concluded that the toad "no ways differed from other toades," but that the melancholy old woman had brought it home some evening and had tamed it by feeding and had so come to believe it a spirit and her familiar.

When the woman returned and found her "familiar" cut in pieces, she "flew like a Tigris" at his face. The physician offered her money and tried to persuade her that her familiar was nothing more than a toad.

When he found that this did not pacify her he took another tack and told her that he was the king's physician, sent to discover if she were a witch, and, in case she were, to have her apprehended. With this explanation, Harvey was able to get away. He related the story to the king, whose leave he had to go on the expedition. The narrator adds: "I am certayne this for an argument against spirits or witchcraft is the best and most experimentall I ever heard."

Who the justice of the peace was that penned this letter, we are unable even to guess, nor do we know upon whose authority it was published. We cannot, therefore, rest upon it with absolute certainty, but we can say that it possesses several characteristics of a _bona fide_ letter.[33]

If it is such, it gives a new clue to Harvey's conduct in 1634. We of course cannot be sure that the toad incident happened before that time; quite possibly it was after the interest aroused by that affair that the physician made his investigation. At all events, here was a man who had a scientific way of looking into superst.i.tion.

The advent of such a man was most significant in the history of witchcraft, perhaps the most significant fact of its kind in the reign of Charles I. That reign, in spite of the Lancas.h.i.+re affair, was characterized by the continuance and growth of the witch skepticism,[34]

so prevalent in the last years of the previous reign. Disbelief was not yet aggressive, it did not block prosecutions, but it hindered their effectiveness. The gallows was not yet done away with, but its use had been greatly restrained by the central government. Superst.i.tion was still a bird of prey, but its wings were being clipped.[35]

[1] The writer of the _Collection of Modern Relations_ (London, 1693) speaks of an execution at Oxford, but there is nothing to substantiate it in the voluminous publications about Oxford; a Middles.e.x case rests also on doubtful evidence (see appendix C, 1641).

[2] _Cal. St. P., Dom._, 1634-1635, 152.

[3] _Ibid._, 141.

[4] This is of course theory; _cf._ Daudet's story of his childhood in "_Le Pape est mort_."

[5] There seem to be five different sources for the original deposition of young Robinson. Thomas D. Whitaker, _History ... of Whalley_ (3d ed., 1818), 213, has an imperfect transcript of the deposition as given in the Bodleian, Dodsworth MSS., 61, ff. 45-46. James Crossley in his introduction to Potts, _Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the countie of Lancaster_ (Chetham Soc.), lix-lxxii, has copied the deposition given by Whitaker. Thomas Wright, _Narratives of Sorcery and Magic_, II, 112-114, has given the story from a copy of this and of other depositions in Lord Londesborough's MSS. Webster prints a third copy, _Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft_, 347-349. A fourth is in Edward Baines, _History of the ... county ... of Lancaster_, ed. of 1836, I, 604, and is taken from Brit. Mus., Harleian MSS., cod. 6854, f. 26 b. A fifth is in the Bodleian, Rawlinson MSS., D, 399, f. 211. Wright's source we have not in detail, but the other four, while differing slightly as to punctuation, spelling, and names, agree remarkably well as to the details of the story.

[6] _Cal. St. P., Dom._, 1634-1635, 152.

[7] John Stearne, _A Confirmation and Discovery of Witchcraft ...

together with the Confessions of many of those executed since May 1645_ (London, 1648), 11, says that in Lancas.h.i.+re "nineteene a.s.sembled."

Robinson's deposition as printed by Webster, _Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft_, gives nineteen names.

[8] Webster, _op. cit._, 277.

[9] The boy, in his first examinations at London, said he had made up the story himself.

[10] It is a curious thing that one of the justices of the peace was John Starchie, who had been one of the bewitched boys of the Starchie family at Cleworth in 1597. See above, ch. IV. See Baines, _Lancaster_, ed. of 1868-1870, I, 204.

[11] This incident is related by Webster, _op. cit._, 276-278. Webster tells us that the boy was yet living when he wrote, and that he himself had heard the whole story from his mouth more than once. He appends to his volume the original deposition of the lad (at Padiham, February 10 1633/4).

[12] These are given in the same deposition, but the deposition probably represents the boy's statement at the a.s.sizes.

[13] The father had been a witness at the Lancas.h.i.+re trials in 1612. See Baines, _Lancaster_, ed. of 1868-1870, I, 204-205.

[14] That is, of course, so far as we have evidence. It is a little dangerous to hold to absolute negatives.

[15] Webster, _op. cit._, 277. Pelham on May 16, 1634, wrote: "It is said that 19 are condemned and ... 60 already discovered." _Cal. St. P., Dom._, 1634-1635, 26.

[16] It had been reported in London that witches had raised a storm from which Charles had suffered at sea. Pelham's letter, _ibid._

[17] _Ibid._, 77. See also Council Register (MS.), Charles I, vol. IV, p. 658.

[18] _Hist. MSS. Comm. Reports_, XII, 2, p. 53. The chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster wrote in the meantime that the judges had been to see him. What was to be done with the witches?

[19] See _Hist. MSS. Comm. Reports_, X, 2, p. 147; and _Cal. St. P., Dom., 1634-1635_, 98.

[20] _Cal. St. P., Dom._, 1634-1635, 98, 129. See also Council Register (MS.), Chas. I, vol. V, p. 56.

[21] _Cal. St. P., Dom._, 1634-1635, 129.

[22] Webster, _op. cit._, 277, says that they were examined "after by His Majesty and the Council."

[23] See Council Register (MS.), Charles I, vol. IV, p. 657.

[24] _Cal. St. P., Dom., 1634-1635_, 141.

[25] _Ibid._, 152.

[26] _Farington Papers_ (Chetham Soc, no. 39, 1856), 27.

[27] _Hist. MSS. Comm. Reports_, XII, 2, p. 77.