A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 Part 7

[31] _The Triall of Maist. Dorrel_, preface "To the Reader."

[32] Harsnett, _Discovery_, 9.

[33] _Ibid._, 78-98.

[34] Yet Darrel must have realized that he had the worst of it. There is a pathetic acknowledgment of this in the "Preface to the Reader" of his publication, _A Survey of Certaine Dialogical Discourses, written by John Deacon and John Walker ..._ (1602): "But like a tried and weather-beaten bird [I] wish for quiet corner to rest myself in and to drye my feathers in the warme sun."

[35] T. G. Law, "Devil Hunting in Elizabethan England," in _Nineteenth Century_, March, 1894.

[36] On the matter of exorcism the position of the Church of England became fixed by 1604. The question had been a cause of disagreement among the leaders of the Reformation. The Lutherans retained exorcism in the baptismal ritual and rivalled the Roman clergy in their exorcism of the possessed. It was just at the close of the sixteenth century that there arose in Lutheran Germany a hot struggle between the believers in exorcism and those who would oust it as a superst.i.tion. The Swiss and Genevan reformers, unlike Luther, had discarded exorcism, declaring it to have belonged only to the early church, and charging modern instances to Papist fraud; and with them seem to have agreed their South German friends. In England baptismal exorcism was at first retained in the ritual under Edward VI, but in 1552, under Bucer's influence, it was dropped. Under Elizabeth the yet greater influence of Zurich and Geneva must have discredited all exorcism, and one finds abundant evidence of this in the writings of Jewel and his followers. An interesting letter of Archbishop Parker in 1574 shows his utter incredulity as to possession in the case of Agnes Bridges and Rachel Pinder of Lothbury; see Parker's _Correspondence_ (Parker Soc., Cambridge, 1856), 465-466.

His successor, the Calvinistic Whitgift, was almost certainly of the same mind. Bancroft, the next archbishop of Canterbury, drew up or at least inspired that epoch-making body of canons enacted by Convocation in the spring of 1604, the 72d article of which forbids any Anglican clergyman, without the express consent of his bishop obtained beforehand, to use exorcism in any fas.h.i.+on under any pretext, on pain of being counted an impostor and deposed from the ministry. This ended the matter so far as the English church was concerned. For this resume of the Protestant and the Anglican att.i.tude toward exorcism I am indebted to Professor Burr.

[37] Harsnett, _A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures_ (London, 1605), 136-138.

[38] It is not impossible that Harsnett was acting as a mouth-piece for Bancroft. Darrel wrote: "There is no doubt but that S. H. stand for Samuell Harsnet, chapline to the Bishop of London, but whither he alone, or his lord and hee, have discovered this counterfeyting and cosonage there is the question. Some thinke the booke to be the Bishops owne doing: and many thinke it to be the joynt worke of them both." _A Detection of that sinnful ... discours of Samuel Harshnet_, 7, 8.

[39] From 1602 until 1609 he was archdeacon of Ess.e.x; see _Victoria History of Ess.e.x_, II, (London, 1907), 46.

[40] There is a statement by the Reverend John Swan, who wrote in 1603, that Harsnett's book had been put into the hands of King James, presumably after his coming to England; see John Swan, _A True and Breife Report of Mary Glover's Vexation, and of her deliverance ..._ (1603), "Dedication to the King," 3. One could wish for some confirmation of this statement. Certainly James would not at that time have sympathized with Harsnett's views about witches, but his att.i.tude on several occasions toward those supposed to be possessed by evil spirits would indicate that he may very well have been influenced by a reading of the _Discovery_.

[41] On page 36 of the _Discovery_ Harsnett wrote: "Whether witches can send devils into men and women (as many doe pretende) is a question amongst those that write of such matters, and the learneder and sounder sort doe hold the negative." One does not need to read far in Harsnett to understand what he thought.

[42] His scholars.h.i.+p, evident from his books, is attested by Thomas Fuller, who calls him "a man of great learning, strong parts, and stout spirit" (_Worthies of England_, ed. of London, 1840, I, 507).

[43] See his _Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures_, 134-136; his _Discovery_ also shows the use of Scot.

[44] Harsnett, _Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures_, 98, 123, 110.

[45] Read _ibid._, 131-140.

[46] Joseph Hunter, _New Ill.u.s.trations of the Life, Studies and Writings of Shakespeare_ (London, 1845), I, 380-390.

CHAPTER V.

JAMES I AND WITCHCRAFT.

Some one has remarked that witchcraft came into England with the Stuarts and went out with them. This offhand way of fixing the rise and fall of a movement has just enough truth about it to cause misconception.

Nothing is easier than to glance at the alarms of Elizabeth's reign and to see in them accidental outbreaks with little meaning, isolated affairs presaging a new movement rather than part of it. As a matter of fact, any such view is superficial. In previous chapters the writer has endeavored to show just how foreign ideas and conditions at home gave the impulse to a movement which within a single reign took very definite form.

Yet so much was the movement accelerated, such additional impetus was given it by James I, that the view that James set the superst.i.tion going in England, however superficial, has some truth in it. If Elizabeth had ever given the matter thought, she had not at least given it many words.

James had very definite opinions on the subject and hesitated not at all to make them known. His views had weight. It is useless to deny that the royal position swayed the courts. James's part in the witch persecution cannot be condoned, save on the ground that he was perfectly honest. He felt deeply on the matter. It was little wonder. He had grown up in Scotland in the very midst of the witch alarms. His own life, he believed, had been imperilled by the machinations of witches. He believed he had every reason to fear and hate the creatures, and we can only wonder that he was so moderate as we shall later find him to have been. The story of the affair that stirred up the Scottish king and his people has often been told, but it must be included here to make his att.i.tude explicable. In 1589 he had arranged for a marriage with the Princess Anne of Denmark. The marriage had been performed by proxy in July, and it was then provided that the princess was to come to England.

She set out, but was driven on to the coast of Norway by a violent storm, and detained there by the continuance of the storms. James sailed to Upsala, and, after a winter in the north of the Continent, brought his bride to Scotland in the spring, not without encountering more rough weather. To the people of the time it was quite clear that the ocean was unfriendly to James's alliance. Had Scotland been ancient Greece, no doubt Neptune would have been propitiated by a sacrifice. But it was Scotland, and the ever-to-be-feared Satan was not so easily propitiated.

He had been very active of late in the realm.

Moreover it was a time when Satanic and other conspiracies were likely to come to light. The kingdom was unsettled, if not discontented. There were plots, and rumors of plots. The effort to expose them, as well as to thwart the attacks of the evil one on the king, led to the conception and spread of the monstrous story of the conspiracy of Dr. Fian. Dr.

Fian was nothing less than a Scottish Dr. Faustus. He was a schoolmaster by profession. After a dissolute youth he was said to have given soul to the Devil. According to the story he gathered around him a motley crowd, Catholic women of rank, "wise women," and humble peasant people; but it was a crew ready for evil enterprise. It is not very clear why they were supposed to have attacked the king; perhaps because of his well known piety, perhaps because he was a Protestant. In any case they set about, as the story went, to destroy him, and thought to have found their opportunity in his trip to Denmark. They would drown him in a storm at sea. There was a simple expedient for raising a storm, the throwing of cats into the sea. This Scottish method of sacrificing to Neptune was duly carried out, and, as we have seen, just fell short of destroying the king. It was only the piety of the king, as Dr. Fian admitted in his confession, that overmatched the power of the evil one.[1]

Such is the story that stirred Scotland from end to end. It is a story that is easily explained. The confessions were wrung from the supposed conspirators by the various forms of torture "lately provided for witches in that country." Geillis Duncane had been tried with "the torture of the pilliwinkes upon her fingers, which is a grievous torture, and binding or wrinching her head with a cord or roape." Agnes Sampson had suffered terrible tortures and shameful indignities until her womanly modesty could no longer endure it and she confessed "whatsoever was demanded of her." Dr. Fian was put through the ordinary forms of torture and was then "put to the most severe and cruel pain in the world, called the bootes," and thereby was at length induced to break his silence and to incriminate himself. At another time, when the king, who examined him in person, saw that the man was stubborn and denied the confessions already made, he ordered him to be tortured again. His finger nails were pulled off with a pair of pincers, and under what was left of them needles were inserted "up to the heads."

This was followed by other tortures too terrible to narrate.[2]

It is a little hard to understand how it was that the king "took great delight to be present at the examinations," but throughout the whole wretched series of trials he was never wanting in zeal. When Barbara Napier, sister-in-law to the laird of Carshoggil, was to be executed, a postponement had been granted on account of her approaching accouchement. Afterwards, "n.o.body insisting in the pursute of her, she was set at libertie." It seems also that the jury that had before condemned her had acquitted her of the main charge, that of treasonable witchcraft against the king. The king was angered at the default of justice, went to the Tolbooth, and made an address on the subject. He spoke of "his own impartiality, the use of witchcraft, the enormity of the crime, ... the ignorance of thinking such matters mere fantasies, the cause of his own interference in the matter, the ignorance of the a.s.sizes in the late trial, his own opinion of what witches really are."[3]

It was only a few years later that James put that opinion into written form. All the world knows that the king was a serious student. With unremitting zeal he studied this matter, and in 1597, seven years after the Dr. Fian affair, he published his _Daemonologie_.[4] It was expressly designed to controvert the "d.a.m.nable opinions of two princ.i.p.ally in our age"--Scot, who "is not ashamed in publick Print to deny that there can be such a thing as witchcraft," and Wierus, "a German physician," who "sets out a publicke apologie for all these craft-folkes whereby ... he plainly bewrayes himself to have been one of that profession."

It was to be expected that James would be an exponent of the current system of belief. He had read diligently, if not widely, in the Continental lore of the subject and had a.s.similated much of it. He was Scotch enough to be interested in theology and Stuart enough to have very definite opinions. James had, too, his own way of putting things.

There was a certain freshness about his treatment, in spite of the fact that he was ploughing old fields. Nothing ill.u.s.trates better his combination of adherence to tradition, of credulity, and of originality than his views on the transportation of witches, a subject that had long engaged the theorists in demonology. Witches could be transported, he believed, by natural means, or they could be carried through the air "by the force of the spirit which is their conducter," as Habakkuk was carried by the angel.[5] This much he could accept. But that they could be transformed into a "little beast or foule" and pierce through "whatsoever house or Church, though all ordinarie pa.s.sages be closed,"

this he refused to believe. So far, however, there was nothing original about either his belief or his disbelief. But his suggestion on another matter was very probably his own. There had been long discussion as to how far through the air witches could go. It was James's opinion that they could go only so far as they could retain their breath.

But it was seldom that the royal demonologist wandered far from the beaten road. He was a conformist and he felt that the orthodox case needed defence: so he set about to answer the objectors. To the argument that it was a strange thing that witches were melancholy and solitary women (and so, he would have explained, offer the easiest object of attack) he interposed a flat denial: they are "some of them rich and worldly-wise, some of them fat or corpulent in their bodies." To the point that if witches had the power ascribed to them no one but themselves would be left alive in the world, he answered that such would be the case, were not the power of the Devil bridled by G.o.d. To the plea that G.o.d would not allow his children to be vexed by the Devil, he replied that G.o.d permits the G.o.dly who are sleeping in sin to be troubled; that He even allows the Evil One to vex the righteous for his own good--a conventional argument that has done service in many a theological controversy.

It is a curious circ.u.mstance that James seemingly recognized the reliability of the Romish exorcisms which the Church of England was about that time beginning to attack. His explanation of them is worthy of "the wisest fool in Christendom." The Papists could often effect cures of the possessed, he thought, because "the divell is content to release the bodily hurting of them, ... thereby to obtain the perpetual hurt of the soules."

That James should indulge in religious disquisitions rather than in points of evidence was to be expected. Although he had given up the Scottish theology, he never succeeded in getting it thoroughly out of his system. As to the evidence against the accused, the royal writer was brief. Two sorts of evidence he thought of value, one "the finding of their marke, and the trying the insensiblenes thereof, the other is their fleeting [floating] on the water." The latter sign was based, he said, on the fact that the water refuses to receive a witch--that is to say, the pure element would refuse to receive those who had renounced their baptism.[6] We shall see that the influence of the _Daemonologie_ can be fairly appraised by measuring the increased use of these two tests of guilt within his own reign and that of his son. Hitherto the evidence of the mark had been of rather less importance, while the ordeal by water was not in use.

The alleged witch-mark on the body had to do with the contracts between witches and the Devil. This loathsome side of witch belief we cannot go into. Suffice it to say that James insisted on the reality of these contracts and consequently upon the punishment that should be meted to those who had entered into them. All witches except children should be sentenced to death. The king shows a trace of conventional moderation, however, and admits that the magistrates should be careful whom they condemned. But, while he holds that the innocent should not be condemned, he warns officials against the sin of failing to convict the guilty.[7] We shall see that throughout his reign in England he pursued a course perfectly consistent with these principles.

A critical estimate of James's book it is somewhat hard to give.

Students of witchcraft have given utterance to the most extravagant but widely divergent opinions upon it. The writer confesses that he has not that acquaintance with the witch literature of the Continent which would enable him to appraise the _Daemonologie_ as to its originality. So good an authority as Thomas Wright has declared that it is "much inferior to the other treatises on the subject," and that it was compiled from foreign works.[8] Doubtless a study of the Continental literature would warrant, at least in part, this opinion. Yet one gets the impression, from what may be learned of that great body of writing through the historians of witchcraft, that James's opinions were in some respects his own. He had, of course, absorbed the current belief, but he did not hesitate to give his own interpretation and explanation of phenomena.

That interpretation is not wanting in shrewdness. It seems to one who has wandered through many tedious defences of the belief in witchcraft that James's work is as able as any in English prior to the time of Joseph Glanvill in 1668. One who should read Glanvill and James together would get a very satisfactory understanding of the position of the defenders of the superst.i.tion. Glanvill insisted upon what he believed were well authenticated facts of experience. James grounded his belief upon a course of theoretical reasoning.

We have already indicated that James's book was influential in its time.

It goes without saying that his position as a sovereign greatly enhanced its influence. This was particularly true after he took the throne of England. The dicta that emanated from the executive of the English nation could not fail to find a wide audience, and especially in England itself. His work offered a text-book to officials. It was a key to the character and methods of the new ruler, and those who hoped for promotion were quick to avail themselves of it. To prosecute witches was to win the sovereign's approval. The judges were prompted to greater activity. Moreover, the sanction of royalty gave to popular outbreaks against suspicious women greater consideration at the hands of the gentry. And it was in the last a.n.a.lysis the gentry, in the persons of the justices of the peace, who decided whether or no neighborhood whispering and rumors should be followed up.

But the king's most direct influence was in the pa.s.sing of a new law.

His first Parliament had been in session but eight days when steps were taken by the House of Lords towards strengthening the statute against witchcraft. The law in force, pa.s.sed in the fifth year of Elizabeth's reign, imposed the death penalty for killing by witchcraft, and a year's imprisonment for injuring by witchcraft or by allied means. James would naturally feel that this law was merely one version of the statute against murder and did not touch the horrible crime of contract with the Devil and the keeping of imps.[9] Here was a sin beside which the taking of life was a light offence. It was needful that those who were guilty of it should suffer the severest penalty of the law, even if they had not caused the loss of a single life. It was to remedy this defect in the criminal code that a new statute was introduced.

It is not worth while to trace the progress of that bill from day to day. It can be followed in the journals of the Lords and Commons. The bill went to a large committee that included six earls and twelve bishops.[10] Perhaps the presence of the bishops was an evidence that witchcraft was still looked upon as a sin rather than as a crime. It was a matter upon which the opinion of the church had been received before and might well be accepted again. It was further arranged that the Lord Chief-Justice of the common pleas, Sir Edmund Anderson, and the attorney-general, the later so famous Sir Edward c.o.ke, along with other eminent jurists, were to act with the committee. Anderson, it will be recalled, had presided over numerous trials and had both condemned and released witches. As to c.o.ke's att.i.tude towards this subject, we know not a thing, save that he served on this committee. The committee seems to have found enough to do. At any rate the proposed statute underwent revision.[11] Doubtless the privy council had a hand in the matter;[12]

indeed it is not unlikely that the bill was drawn up under its direction. On the 9th of June, about two months and a half after its introduction, the statute pa.s.sed its final reading in the Lords.[13] It repealed the statute of Elizabeth's reign and provided that any one who "shall use, practise or exercise any Invocation or Conjuration of any evill and wicked Spirit, or shall consult, covenant with, entertaine, employe, feede, or rewarde any evill and wicked Spirit to or for any intent or purpose; or take up any dead man, woman, or child, ... to be imployed or used in any manner of Witchcrafte" should suffer death as a felon. It further provided that any one who should "take upon him or them by Witchcrafte ... to tell or declare in what place any treasure of Golde or Silver should or might be founde ... or where Goods or Things loste or stollen should be founde or become, or to the intent to provoke any person to unlawfull love, or wherebie any Cattell or Goods of any person shall be destroyed, wasted, or impaired, or to hurte or destroy any person in his or her bodie, although the same be not effected and done," should for the first offence suffer one year's imprisonment with four appearances in the pillory, and for the second offence, death. The law explains itself. Not only the killing of people by the use of evil spirits, but even the using of evil spirits in such a way as actually to cause hurt was a capital crime. The second clause punished white magic and the intent to hurt, even where it "be not effected," by a year's imprisonment and the pillory. It can be easily seen that one of the things which the framers of the statute were attempting to accomplish in their somewhat awkward wording was to make the fact of witchcraft as a felony depend chiefly upon a single form of evidence, the testimony to the use of evil spirits.

We have seen why people with James's convictions about contracts with the Devil might desire to rest the crime upon this kind of proof.[14] It can be readily understood, too, how the statute would work in practice.

Hitherto it had been possible to arraign a witch on the accusations of her neighbors, but it was not possible to send her to the gallows unless some death in the vicinity could be laid to her charge. The community that hustled a suspicious woman to court was likely to suffer the expense of her imprisonment for a year. It had no a.s.surance that it could be finally rid of her.

Under the new statute it was only necessary to prove that the woman made use of evil spirits, and she was put out of the way. It was a simpler thing to charge a woman with keeping a "familiar" than to accuse her of murder. The stories that the village gossips gathered in their rounds had the keeping of "familiars" for their central interest.[15] It was only necessary to produce a few of these gossips in court and the woman was doomed.

To be sure, this is theory. The practical question is, not how would the law operate, but how did it operate? This brings us again into the dangerous field of statistics. Now, if we may suppose that the witch cases known to us are a safe basis of comparison, the reign of James, as has already been intimated, shows a notable increase in witch executions over that of Elizabeth. We have records of between forty and fifty people who suffered for the crime during the reign of James, all but one of them within the first fifteen years. It will be seen that the average per year is nearly double that of the executions known to us in the first part of Elizabeth's rule, and of course several times that of those known in the last part. This increased number we are at once inclined to a.s.sign to the direct and indirect influence of the new king.

But it may very fairly be asked whether the new statute pa.s.sed at the king's suggestion had not been in part responsible for the increased number. This question can be answered from an examination of those cases where we have the charges given. Of thirty-seven such cases in the reign of James I, where the capital sentence was given, seventeen were on indictments for witchcrafts that had not caused death. In the other twenty cases, the accused were charged with murder.[16]

This means that over two-fifths of those who are known to have been convicted under the new law would have escaped death under the Elizabethan statute. With all due allowance for the incompleteness of our statistics, it seems certain that the new law had added very considerably to the number of capital sentences. Subtract the seventeen death sentences for crimes of witchcraft that were not murder from the total number of such sentences, and we have figures not so different from those of Elizabeth's reign.

This is a sufficient comment on the effectiveness of the new law as respects its particularly novel features. A study of the character of the evidence and of the tests of guilt employed at the various trials during the reign will show that the phrasing of the law, as well as the royal directions for trying guilt, influenced the forms of accusation and the verdicts of the juries. In other words the testimony rendered in some of the well known trials of the reign offers the best commentary upon the statute as well as upon the _Daemonologie_. This can be ill.u.s.trated from three of the processes employed to determine guilt. The king had recommended the water ordeal. Up to this time it had not been employed in English witch cases, so far as we know. The first record of its use was in 1612, nine years after James ascended the English throne.

In that year there was a "discoverie" of witches at Northampton. Eight or nine women were accused of torturing a man and his sister and of laming others. One of them was, at the command of a justice of the peace, cast into the water with "her hands and feete bound," but "could not sink to the bottome by any meanes." The same experiment was applied to Arthur Bill and his parents. He was accused of bewitching a Martha Aspine. His father and mother had long been considered witches. But the "matter remaining doubtful that it could not be cleerly tryed upon him,"

he (and his parents) were tied with "their thumbes and great toes ...

acrosse" and thrown into the water. The suspicion that was before not well grounded was now confirmed.[17] To be sure, this was done by the justices of the peace and we do not know how much it influenced the a.s.size court.[18]

These are the only instances given us by the records of James's reign where this test was employed by the authorities. But in the very next year after the Northampton affair it was used in the adjoining county of Bedford by private parties. A land-owner who had suffered ills, as he thought, from two tenants, Mother Sutton and her daughter, took matters into his own hands. His men were ordered to strip the two women "in to their smocks," to tie their arms together, and to throw them into the water. The precaution of a "roape tyed about their middles" was useless, for both floated. This was not enough. The mother, tied toe and thumb, was thrown into the water again. She "sunke not at all, but sitting upon the water turned round about like a wheele.... And then being taken up, she as boldly as if she had beene innocent asked them if they could doe any more to her."