[26] See above, ch. IV, especially note 36.
[27] On Mary Glover see also appendix A, § 2. On other impostures see Thomas Fuller, Church History of Britain (London, 1655; Oxford, ed. J. S. Brewer, 1845), ed. of 1845, V, 450; letters given by Edmund Lodge, Illustrations of British History, Biography and Manners ... (London, 1791), III, 275, 284, 287-288; also King James, His Apothegms, by B. A., Gent. (London, 1643), 8-10.
[28] Cal. St. P., Dom., 1603-1610, 218.
[29] Fuller, op. cit. , V, 450.
[30] Ibid. ; John Gee, The Foot out of the Snare, or Detection of Practices and Impostures of Priests and Jesuits in England ... (London, 1624), reprinted in Somers Tracts, III, 72.
[31] Ibid. ; Fuller, op. cit. , V, 450.
[32] How much more seriously than his courtiers is suggested by an anecdote of Sir John Harington's: James gravely questioned Sir John why the Devil did work more with ancient women than with others. "We are taught thereof in Scripture," gaily answered Sir John, "where it is told that the Devil walketh in dry places."
See his Nugæ Antiquæ (London, 1769), ed. of London, 1804, I, 368-369.
[33] Fuller, op. cit. , V, 451.
[34] Ibid.
[35] The story of the hangings at Leicester in 1616 has to be put together from various sources. Our principal authority, however, is in two letters written by Robert Heyrick of Leicester to his brother William in 1616, which are to be found in John Nichols, History and Antiquities of the County of Leicester (London, 1795-1815), II, pt. ii, 471, and in the Annual Register for 1800. See also William Kelly, Royal Progresses to Leicester (Leicester, 1884), 367-369. Probably this is the case referred to by Francis Osborne, where the boy was sent to the Archbishop of Canterbury for further examination. Osborne, who wrote a good deal later than the events, apparently confused the story of the Leicester witches with that of the Boy of Bilston--their origins were similar--and produced a strange account; see his Miscellany of Sundry Essays, Paradoxes and Problematicall Discourses (London, 1658-1659), 6-9.
[36] For the disgrace of the judges see Cal. St. P., Dom., 1611-1618, 398.
[37] Webster knew Bishop Morton, and also his secretary, Baddeley, who had been notary in the case and had written an account of it. See John Webster, The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft (London, 1677), 275.
[38] The Catholics declared that the Puritans tried "syllabub" upon him. This was perhaps a sarcastic reference to their attempts to cure him by medicine.
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[39] Then of Lichfield.
[40] Baddeley, who was Bishop Morton's secretary and who prepared the narrative of the affair for the printer, says that the woman was freed by the inquest; Ryc. Baddeley, The Boy of Bilson ... (London, 1622), 61.
Arthur Wilson, who tells us that he heard the story "from the Bishop's own mouth almost thirty years before it was inserted here," says that the woman was found guilty and condemned to die; Arthur Wilson, Life and Reign of James I (London, 1653), 107. It is evident that Baddeley's story is the more trustworthy. It is of course possible, although not probable, that there were two trials, and that Baddeley ignored the second one, the outcome of which would have been less creditable to the bishop.
[41] Webster, Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft, 275.
[42] See Fairfax, A Discourse of Witchcraft (Philobiblon Soc.): "and those whose impostures our wise King so lately laid open." See also an interesting letter from James himself in J. O. Halliwell, Letters of the Kings of England (London, 1846), II, 124-125.
[43] Fuller, Church History of Britain, V, 452 (ch. X, sect. 4). It is worthy of note that Peter Heylyn, who, in his Examen Historicum (London, 1659), sought to pick Fuller to pieces, does not mention this point.
[44] See Francis Osborne, Miscellany, 4-9. Lucy Aikin, Memoirs of the Court of King James the First (London, 1823), II, 398-399, gives about the same story as Fuller and Osborne, and, while the wording is slightly different, it is probable that they were her sources.
[45] Arthur Wilson, op. cit. , 111, tells us: "The King took delight by the line of his reason to sound the depth of such brutish impostors, and he discovered many." A writer to the Gentleman's Magazine (LIV, pt. I, 246-247), in 1784, says that he has somewhere read that King James on his death-bed acknowledged that he had been deceived in his opinion respecting witchcraft and expressed his concern that so many innocent persons had suffered on that account. But, as he has forgotten where he read it, his evidence is of course of small value.
[46] The college where an annual sermon was preached on the subject of witchcraft since the Warboys affair.
[47] Osborne's statement should perhaps be discounted a little on account of his skepticism. On the other hand he was not such an admirer of James I as to have given him undue credit. Fuller's opinion was divided.
[48] James still believed in witchcraft in 1613, when the malodorous divorce trial of Lady Essex took place. A careful reading of his words at that time, however, leaves the impression that he was not nearly so certain about the possibilities of witchcraft as he had been when he wrote his book. His position was clearly defensive. It must be remembered that James in 1613 had a point to be gained and would not have allowed a possible doubt as to witchcraft to interfere with his wish for the divorce. See Howell, State Trials, II, 806.
[49] One of them was publicly searched by command of a justice. See Fairfax, op. cit. , 138-139.
[50] Ibid. , 205. Two of the women had gone home before, ibid. , 180.
[51] Ibid. , 225-234.
[52] Ibid. , 234.
[53] Ibid. , 237-238. If the women were tried twice, it seems a clear violation of the principle of former jeopardy. See above, note 11. The statute of 3 Hen. VII, cap. I, that the plea of antefort acquit was no bar to the prosecution of an appeal, would not apply in this instance, as that statute was limited to cases of homicide.
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[54] Fairfax was moreover a man for whom the king had a high personal regard.
[55] At the August assizes there had been an effort to show that the children were "counterfeiting." See the Discourse, 235-237.
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CHAPTER VII.
THE LANCASHIRE WITCHES AND CHARLES I.
In his attitude towards superstition, Charles I resembled the later rather than the earlier James I. No reign up to the Revolution was marked by so few executions. It was a time of comparative quiet. Here and there isolated murmurs against suspected creatures of the Devil roused the justices of the peace to write letters, and even to make inquiries that as often as not resulted in indefinite commitments, or brought out the protests of neighbors in favor of the accused. But, if there were not many cases, they represented a wide area. Middlesex, Wilts, Somerset, Leicestershire, Staffordshire, Lancashire, Durham, Yorkshire, and Northumberland were among the counties infested. Yet we can count but six executions, and only four of them rest upon secure evidence.[1]
This is of course to reckon the reign of Charles as not extending beyond 1642, when the Civil War broke out and the Puritan leaders assumed responsibility for the government.
Up to that time there was but one really notable witch alarm in England. But it was one that illustrated again, as in Essex, the continuity of the superstition in a given locality. The Lancashire witches of 1633 were the direct outcome of the Lancashire witches of 1612. The story is a weird one. An eleven-year-old boy played truant one day to his cattle-herding, and, as he afterwards told the story, went plum-gathering. When he came back he had to find a plausible excuse to present to his parents. Now, the lad had been brought up in the Blackburn forest, close to Pendle Hill; he had overheard stories of Malking Tower[2] from the chatter of gossipping women;[3] he had shivered as suspected women were pointed out to him; he knew the names of some of them. His imagination, in search for an excuse, caught at the witch motive[4] and elaborated it with the easy invention of youth.[5] He had seen two greyhounds come running towards him. They looked like those owned by two of his neighbors. When he saw that no one was following them, he set out to hunt with them, and presently a hare rose very near before him, at the sight whereof he cried "Loo, Loo," but the dogs would not run. Being very angry, he tied them to a little bush in the hedge and beat them, and at once, instead of the black greyhound, "one Dickonson's wife" stood up, and instead of the brown greyhound "a little boy whom this informer knoweth not." He started to run away, but the woman stayed him and offered him a piece of silver "much like to a faire shillinge" if he would not betray her. The conscientious boy answered "Nay, thou art a witch," "whereupon shee put her hand into her pocket againe and pulled out a stringe like unto a bridle that gingled, which shee put upon the litle boyes heade that stood up in the browne greyhounds steade, whereupon the said boy stood up a white horse." In true Arabian Nights fashion they mounted and rode away.
They came to a new house called Hoarstones, where there were three score or more people, and horses of several colors, and a fire with meat roasting. They had flesh and bread upon a trencher and they drank from glasses. After the first taste the boy "refused and would have noe more, and said it was nought." There were other refreshments at the feast. The boy was, as he afterwards confessed, familiar with the story of the feast at Malking Tower.[6]
The names of those present he did not volunteer at first; but, on being questioned, he named eighteen[7]
whom he had seen. The boy confessed that he had been clever enough to make most of his list from those who were already suspected by their neighbors.
It needed but a match to set off the flame of witch-hatred in Lancashire. The boy's story was quite sufficient.
Whether his narrative was a spontaneous invention of his own, concocted in emergency, as he asserted in his confession at London, or whether it was a carefully constructed lie taught him by his father in order to revenge himself upon some hated neighbors, and perhaps to exact blackmail, as some of the accused later charged, we shall never know. In later life the boy is said to have admitted that he had been set on by his father,[8] but the narrative possesses certain earmarks of a story struck out by a child's imagination.[9] It is easy enough to reconcile the two theories by supposing that the boy started the story of his own initiative and that his father was too shrewd not to realize the opportunity to make a sensation and perhaps some money. He took the boy before justices of the peace, who, with the zeal their predecessors had displayed twenty-two years before, made many arrests.[10] The boy was exhibited from town to town in Lancashire as a great wonder and CHAPTER VII.
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witch-detector. It was in the course of these exhibitions that he was brought to a little town on the Lancashire border of Yorkshire and was taken to the afternoon church service, where a young minister, who was long afterwards to become a famous opponent of the superstition, was discoursing to his congregation. The boy was held up by those in charge as if to give him the chance to detect witches among the audience. The minister saw him, and at the end of the service at once came down to the boy, and without parley asked him,
"Good boy, tell me truly, and in earnest, didst thou see and hear such things of the meeting of the witches as is reported by many that thou dost relate?" The boy, as Webster has told the story, was not given time for reply by the men in charge of him, who protested against such questions. The lad, they said, had been before two justices of the peace, and had not been catechized in that fashion.[11]
A lone skeptic had little chance to beat back the wave of excitement created by the young Robinson's stories.
His success prompted him to concoct new tales.[12] He had seen Lloynd's wife sitting on a cross-bar in his father's chimney; he had called to her; she had not come down but had vanished in the air. Other accounts the boy gave, but none of them revealed the clear invention of his first narrative.
He had done his work. The justices of the peace were bringing in the accused to the assizes at Lancaster.
There Robinson was once more called upon to render his now famous testimony. He was supported by his father,[13] who gave evidence that on the day he had sent his boy for the cattle he had gone after him and as he approached had heard him cry and had found him quite "distracted." When the boy recovered himself, he had related the story already told. This was the evidence of the father, and together with that of the son it constituted the most telling piece of testimony presented. But it served, as was usual in such cases, as an opening for all those who, for any reason, thought they had grounds of suspicion against any of their neighbors. It was recalled by one witness that a neighbor girl could bewitch a pail and make it roll towards her. We shall later have occasion to note the basis of fact behind this curious accusation. There was other testimony of an equally damaging character. But in nearly all the cases stress was laid upon the bodily marks.
In one instance, indeed, nothing else was charged.[14] The reader will remember that in the Lancaster cases of 1612 the evidence of marks on the body was notably absent, so notably that we were led to suspect that it had been ruled out by the judge. That such evidence was now reckoned important is proof that this particularly dark feature of the witch superstition was receiving increasing emphasis.
How many in all were accused we do not know. Webster, writing later, said that seventeen were found guilty.[15] It is possible that even a larger number were acquitted. Certainly some were acquitted. A distinction of some sort was made in the evidence. This makes it all the harder to understand why the truth of Robinson's stories was not tested in the same way in which those of Grace Sowerbutts had been tested in 1612. Did that detection of fraud never occur to the judges, or had they never heard of the famous boy at Bilston? Perhaps not they but the juries were to blame, for it seems that the court was not altogether satisfied with the jury's verdict and delayed sentence. Perhaps, indeed, the judges wrote to London about the matter. Be that as it may, the privy council decided to take cognizance of an affair that was already the talk of the realm.[16] Secretaries Coke and Windebank sent instructions to Henry Bridgeman, Bishop of Chester and successor to that Morton who had exposed the boy of Bilston, to examine seven of the condemned witches and to make a report.[17] Bridgeman doubtless knew of his predecessor's success in exposing fraudulent accusations. Before the bishop was ready to report, His Majesty sent orders that three or four of the accused should be brought up to London by a writ of habeas corpus. Owing to a neglect to insert definite names, there was a delay.[18] It was during this interval, probably, that Bishop Bridgeman was able to make his examination. He found three of the seven already dead and one hopelessly ill. The other three he questioned with great care. Two of them, Mary Spencer, a girl of twenty, and Frances Dickonson, the first whom Robinson had accused, made spirited denials. Mary Spencer avowed that her accusers had been actuated by malice against her and her parents for several years. At the trial, she had been unable, she said, to answer for herself, because the noise of the crowd had been so great as to prevent her from hearing the evidence against her. As for the charge of bewitching a pail so that it came running towards her of its own accord, she declared that she used as a child to roll a pail down-hill and to call it after her as she ran, a perfectly natural piece of child's play. Frances Dickonson, too, charged malice upon her accusers, especially upon the father of Edmund CHAPTER VII.
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Robinson. Her husband, she said, had been unwilling to sell him a cow without surety and had so gained his ill-will. She went on to assert that the elder Robinson had volunteered to withdraw the charges against her if her husband would pay him forty shillings. This counter charge was supported by another witness and seemed to make a good deal of an impression on the ecclesiastic.
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 "Ship 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 Lancashire case to give his physician a chance to assert 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 Lancashire, 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 Middlesex 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 instituted 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 Hoarstones. 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 CHAPTER VII.
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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 class, but that they represented a good type of farming people. Frances Dickonson'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 godly 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 superstition in certain localities. It is obvious that Lancashire offers one of the best illustrations 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 Lancashire 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 Essex 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 superstition.
We have already referred to the widespread interest in the Lancashire witches. There are two good illustrations 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 Lancashire 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 Lancashire 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 Lancashire 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 CHAPTER VII.
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Robinson and from the charges preferred against Mary Spencer, Frances Dickonson, and Margaret Johnson, that a layman would at once pronounce 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 superstitious. 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 Lancashire 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 Lancashire affair to miss a central figure. Frances Dickonson, 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 manuscript 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