Chapter II · THE WITCH TRIALS

Towards the middle of the seventeenth century there lived at Manningtree a certain Matthew Hopkins, whose name deserves perhaps to be recorded. Not that he stands by any means apart, a veritable Lucifer among the devils. Sprenger in Germany, Torquemada in Spain, Grillandus in Italy, de l’Ancre in France, and other persecutors over Christendom, were better known and had killed more people. But Hopkins went to work on English ground. The people were then professing the same creed that the majority do now. Shakespeare had been in his grave more than a generation, and trees may have been standing as bushes in the fields and lanes of Essex which will yet renew leaves and branches at the kiss of coming spring. Hopkins reveals the spirit of his time, for it has been wisely observed that every society has the criminals it deserves. His kind remain with us still as spies and blackmailers, traitors and “friendly natives” of the tribe of Judas generally. But they derive their power to harm from the community in which they live. Parasites need a proper “host” to flourish in. A dark and superstitious age it must have been to countenance this man; for he was a professional “discoverer,” or, as he was sometimes called and styled, Witch-Finder General. He began with the destruction of some half-dozen persons in his native hamlet. We cannot determine what had marked them down—perhaps they were his private enemies—moral reform has always been a ready pretext to work vengeance with, and has been much employed in these latter days. They may have been old, eccentric, isolated, or insane; in any case, once seized they had to die, and in their torments implicated others, most likely any names conveniently suggested to them. The fame of the new discoverer spread far and wide. Towns and hundreds in the eastern county, and even places far outside its boundaries, sent to this fell apostle, saying, “Come over and help us,” and on the track of blood the monster went. It was his wont to ride upon these expeditions accompanied by another man, and by a female searcher, whose services would be required in the minute personal examinations which were carried out, especially on women. He made an open charge of twenty shillings for each village visited, but no doubt in this nefarious calling there were other and more profitable ways of extorting money. Can we not well imagine what sums may have been paid to him (as they are to the “sex” blackmailers of to-day) to avoid accusation? How many may have yielded their little all to save some one who was dear to them from common ill-usage, probable death, and certain disgrace, which such a charge involved? Who knows how extorted gold might influence the ordeals enforced? Who shall say what may have come by stealth to the witch-finders to bring ruin upon some enemy, perhaps upon some rival? Who, indeed? From place to place swooped this bird of prey, descending on peaceful homesteads and capturing whom he chose. Woe to the man, and still more to the woman, who lived alone, who kept a black cat, or who was found to carry birthmarks on her body, or to be the least out of the normal in physical structure! Woe to the person who was eccentric, subject to fits or trances, or who might be in any way deranged or of weak intellect! Woe, in fact, to the unhappy creature who by any means came in for accusation! The Pishogue mark would thenceforth be upon them; relations would drop away as from contamination with the plague^[516]; and the most brutal rabble of that time would jostle round, intent upon the chase, with their fierce lust for blood not the less keen from the idea that there was something Christian in their cruelty. The victim would then be seized and carried off to further interrogation, ill-treatment, and torture. Parents and children, comrades and lovers, might weep in secret, and the boldest might even venture to denounce the senseless iniquity of the proceedings—at which they would incur no little danger. But they would speak unheeded, and have to linger around the gallows till the final act, when something swayed and dangled from a cord.

But somehow good Master Matthew began to be unpopular, and many reasons might account for it. Perhaps he had been unwise in the selection of his “subjects”—it looks like it, for one was an old clergyman—and lived to find out that some of them had not been quite so friendless as he may have counted on. Perhaps the supply of lonely or defenceless folk had given out, or that in pushing his profession so far afield he could not estimate the new material. “Discoveries,” of course, had to be made to keep up his reputation and his income, and as he pursued his way through a wide area it may be that quite a large number of people began to feel themselves open to accusation, and so were ready to consider it suspicious that he alone had such an eye for witches. And then a whispering rose up amongst them, until it reached the persecutor’s ears: For sure this man is aided by the Devil, or else he would not ferret out so many. And he may well have started when he saw the anger-light in the fierce eyes around him, and when he felt at last the frightful superstitions, which he had kindled and well thriven on, were out of hand, turned hard against himself. So he produced a little book which bears the date of 1647, printed, he tells us, “For the benefit of the whole Kingdome.” It has upon the title-page the somewhat troublesome quotation, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” Exodus xxii. 18. We cannot do better than glance through its pages and at the “Certain queries answered which have been and which are likely to be objected against Matthew Hopkins, in his way of finding out witches.”

Querie I.—That he must needs be the greatest witch, sorcerer, and wizzard himself, else hee could not doe it.

Answer.—If Satan’s Kingdome be divided against itself how shall it stand?

The next paragraph is interesting as once more emphasising the crude and absolutely material notions conceived of the spiritual world.

Querie II.—If he never went so farre as is before stated, yet for certaine he met with the devill and cheated him of his booke, wherein were written all the witches’ names in England, and if he looks at any witch he can tell by her countenance what she is; so by this his helpe is from the devill.

Answer.—If he had been too hard for the devill and got his booke it had been to his great commendation and no disgrace at all.

It will be noticed that he does not exactly deny even this report, or appear to consider it at all unusual to meet the devil walking about casually. “We must needs argue,” he continues later, “he is of long standing, above 6000 years, then he must needs be the best scholar in all knowledge of Arts and tongues, and so have the best skill in Physicke, etc.” Mr. Hopkins’ own skill, he pleads, was really forced on him. “This discoverer never travelled for it,” he writes in reply to Querie V., “but in March 1644 he had some seven or eight of that horrible sect of witches living in the towne where he lived ... who every six weeks, in the night (being always on a Friday night), had their meetings^[517] close by his house, and had their severall solemne sacrifices there offered to the devill, one of which this discoverer heard speaking to her imps one night and bid them go to another witch, who was thereupon apprehended and searched by women who had for many years known the devill’s marks, and found to have three teats about her, which honest women have not. So upon command from the Justice they were to keep her from sleep two or three nights, expecting in that time to see her familiars, which the fourth night she called by their severall names,^[518] and told them in what shape a quarter of an hour before they came in, there being ten of us in the roome.^[519]

“The first she called was (1) Holt, who came in like a white Kitling. (2) Jamara, who came in like a fat Spaniel without any legs at all.... (3) Vinegar Tom, who was like a long legged grey hound with a head like an Oxe with a long taile and broad eyes, who, when this discoverer spoke to and bade him go to the place provided for him and his angels, immediately transformed himself into the shape of a child foure years old without a head and gave half a dozen turns about the house and vanished at the doore. (4) Sacke and Sugar, like a black rabbet. (5) Newes, like a Polcat. All these vanished away in a little while. Immediately after this witch confessed severall other witches from whom she had her imps and named to diverse women where their marks were ... and imps’ names such as Elimanzer Pyewacket, Peck-in-the-crown, Grizzell Greedigut, etc.; which no mortall could invent.... Twenty-nine were condemned at once, four brought twenty-five miles to be hanged where their discoverer lives, for sending the devill like a beare to kill him in his garden; so by seeing diverse of the men’s papps and trying various wayes with hundreds of them, he gained the experience.”

Although his dealings must be described as mild compared with the ghastly inconceivable tortures in vogue with the inquisitors upon the Continent,^[520] his victims were yet baited and handled with the grossest cruelty. They were supposed not to weep,^[521] being witches, though indeed cause enough was given them. It is remarkable in this connection that Shelley,^[522] with how much accuracy I am not aware, alludes to the “dry fixed eyeball” of the tortured. Hutchinson^[523] held this phenomenon to have been due to prolonged deprivation of sleep and exhaustion. Doubtless the weary length of the investigations, and often the age and senile desiccation of the victims, might easily explain a state of tearlessness whenever it was really prevalent.

They were supposed to possess an insensible part in their bodies,^[524] and the examiners would prick over them to try to find it out. Especially, a witch was affirmed to have somewhere upon her person the “Devil’s mark.” “Some bigg or place upon their body where he” (the familiar, imp, or spirit) “sucketh them.”^[525] This alleged “mark” might be almost anything or nothing; from an abnormal, and perhaps atavic, teat, down to a birthmark, mole, old scar, or even a tiny vein under an eyelid. They were supposed also to float upon being “swum.”

They were, for the most part, wizen, old creatures, clad in long-used, greasy garments.^[526] Such skirts would retain much air; they might be bound so as to favour this, or spread, as with Ophelia, widely inflated. It was quite likely they should thus be upborne (and also, for they were mostly poor and thin, that the heavy, sometimes chained, Bible should outweigh them in the ordeal with scales). But ordeals are uncertain and dangerous unless they can be carefully manipulated. Mr. Hopkins had been keen on the water test; it was the finishing touch and proof at the end of a long series of torments and examinations.

But a day came, it is said, on which a few brave Englishmen, who had perhaps lost some one near and dear to them at his hands, laid hold upon the witch-finder himself, and binding him in a sack, cast him into a pool. It was a bold act, in those savage days, to interfere with any kind of inquisition. Catholic or Puritan, and was no doubt attended with great risk. But only for a moment in this case, for there before them bobbed the dread discoverer of witches, floating upon the surface of the water; and all declared the devil got his own. But such an end was altogether unexpected and unusual; it was downright bad luck and misfortune, from Mr. Hopkins’ point of view. His position appeared unassailable, and indeed probably would have been, if he had kept to the right sort of people, and practised on the isolated or unpopular, who could have been legitimately sacrificed. All he had done was quite lawful and regular.

Witchcraft, like many acts against religion and morality, had always been an ecclesiastical offence, and had been punished in the secular courts as leading to murder and personal injury,^[527] and it was made a felony in 1541.^[528] But it was the (then) recent law of 1603 that was much in force,^[529] by which, in the quaint language of the statute, it was forbidden, upon pain of death, to “employ, feed, or reward an evil and wicked spirit.”^[530] And since the High Court of Parliament had recognised witches,^[531] it became necessary to investigate accusations and probe for “spirits” through the forms of law. Thus Hopkins could claim to be a moral reformer, putting in force the statute of the realm; he could quote Scripture clearly to his purpose, the justices and gaolers obeyed his call, assizes waited to condemn his prisoners. And if his method seemed superstitious or barbarous, he could perhaps cite Mr. Perkins’ way,^[532] or could refer to Mr. Kincaid’s custom in these matters,^[533] and could quote standard works with precedent on his side.^[534]

So he seemed truly to have a safe task and a paying one, built up upon the prejudices of the people. But as by their superstitions he rose, so also by them he fell—utterly, and unpitied.^[535] It was not his monstrous cruelties, but “God’s ordeal,” which showed him up, delivered to the devil; and, in the caustic words of Samuel Butler, as one “who after proved himself a witch, and made a rod for his own breech.”^[536]

But now, dismissing this particular parasite, we may review the course of thought upon the question. Belief in witchcraft is so ancient and so universal,^[537] that the existing religions, and perhaps all religions whatsoever, must have arisen in its atmosphere.

From time to time the Christian Church dealt with the question,^[538] and had elaborated quite a ritual of tests and remedies. And it was after nearly fifteen hundred years of Christianity that Pope Innocent VIII.^[539] issued a special Bull against all supposed witches (December 5, 1484), naming one Sprenger, a Dominican, and Krämar—whose name latinised to Institor—inquisitors to seek and punish them; and this they did with frightful cruelty. They wrote a text-book on their methods and discoveries about 1489, and kept the torture chambers busy and the faggots fiercely burning.

Their book was answered by John Wier, physician to the Duke of Cleves, in 1563.^[540] He refuted many of the grosser superstitions prevailing, and also suggested that the devil deceived people and made many confess to impossible practices;^[541] likewise, that the witches did not really occasion the illnesses and calamities which they were accused of causing and even admitted having brought about.^[542]

At first the work awakened only controversy and condemnation—a stage in advance, however, since the most wronged are generally undefended, and pass to their doom in silence and with no one to speak for them.

In 1580 Bodin, a French writer, published a most furious attack on Dr. Wier, declaring him to have been the pupil of a sorcerer and that he wrote inspired by the devil. He reiterated all the old fantastic stories as being true, and in the hideous procedure of investigation which he set forth, applied such diverse and such agonising torments as could not have been surpassed by any of the earlier inquisitors.

Bodin in turn was answered, from England, by Reginald Scot, in 1584, who wrote a long and powerful review of the witch persecutions, in which he quotes extensively from Sprenger, Bodin, and the Continental tormentors. Full of wise saws and modern instances, he cast doubts on the rationale of the witchcraft tests and trials.

But although just a century had gone by since Innocent launched his Bull from the Papal throne, many poor people, some at that time unborn, were destined still to suffer trial and torture. And more than another century had to pass before the law would leave “witches” alone; before afflicted, half-mad, or unpopular old women could throw crumbs to the sparrows upon the snow, or keep a cat, without danger of death. King James, as a young man, fell foul of both Scot and Wier in 1597. Speaking of them he said: “One called Scot, an Englishman, is not ashamed in publicke print to deny that there can be such a thing as witchcraft, and so he maintains the old error of the Sadducees in denying spirits. The other called Wierus, a German phisition, sets out a publick apologie for al these craftes-folkes—whereby procuring for their impunitie he plainly betrayes himselfe to have been one of their profession”; and six years later came his grotesque law already alluded to, sanctioned with all the weight of Parliament.^[543] The trials in Germany were severely criticised in 1631 by Father Spee, who published his book at first anonymously,^[544] and checked the ardour and the cruelty of the courts.

But they were defended again by Joseph Glanvil,^[545] chaplain to the king, in 1681. About this time Dr. Bekker, a clergyman, living in Holland, compiled four lengthy volumes about witchcraft,^[546] in which he contended that neither devils nor spirits could act on mankind. In England, ten years later, wrote Richard Baxter,^[547] author of The Saints’ Rest and other evangelical works which were widely read, supporting the weird beliefs of the witchcraft schoolmen.

By this time the persecutions, which were waning in England, had broken out at Salem in America; and we find Cotton Mather (like Glanvil, a divine, and F.R.S.) writing a little book^[548] to justify their existence^[549] (and his own conduct, for many were sceptical), upon that continent where, as he quaintly says, the Pilgrim Fathers “imagined that they should leave their posterity in a place where they should never see the inroads of Profanity or Superstition.” The records of the nineteen executions in this neighbourhood, of one poor creature who was pressed to death, and of the crowd of unhappy suspects who were cast into the prison,^[550] show how the frenzy of this murderous “revival” swept like an epidemic down upon the settlement,^[551] so that for fifteen months the air seemed charged and laden with hysteria, and are a grim commentary. But evolution operates even on taboos and superstitions, and this was probably the last general persecution, and Bishop Hutchinson called his learned work An Historical Essay,^[552] for it was dealing mainly with the past. The law lagged behind, however, as it generally does, the statute of James I. (1603) being, when Hutchinson wrote, “now in force” in 1718.

And so it continued for eighteen years longer, until repealed in 1736.^[553] In Ireland the law lasted until 1821. Witchcraft was clearly kept alive by theology. People who really believed in a personal devil (and even those who questioned the witch convictions assumed the devil to be very much alive), designing mischief and disguised everywhere, could easily accept tales of familiar spirits.^[554]

Those who received the Hebrew and Christian records as altogether inspired, could not ignore possession and sorcery.^[555] “Après que Dieu a parlé,” says de l’Ancre, “de sa propre bouche des magiciens et sorciers, qui est l’incrédule qui en peut justement douter?”^[556] And Sir Matthew Hale said in his summing up: “That there were such creatures as witches, he made no doubt at all. For, first, the Scriptures had affirmed so much; secondly, the wisdom of all nations had provided laws against such persons, which is an argument of their confidence of such a crime.”^[557]

Speaking of a particular case, Mr. H. L. Stephen^[558] quotes Campbell as follows: “... During the trial the imposture practised by the prosecutors was detected and exposed. Hales’ motives were most laudable; but he furnished a memorable instance of the mischief originating from superstition. He was afraid of an acquittal or a pardon, lest countenance should be given to a disbelief in witchcraft, which he considered tantamount to disbelief in Christianity.” Glanvil^[559] follows on the same side, arguing with great ingenuity from the scriptural point of view (for instance, in dealing with certain doctrines as to the fate of unbaptized children, p. 22). “The question whether there are witches or not,” he begins in Part ii., “is not a matter of vain speculation or of indifferent moment, but an inquiry of very great and weighty importance. For on the resolution of it depends the authority of our laws, and, which is more, our religion, in its main doctrines, is nearly concerned.”

And what may be called the religious belief in witches^[560]—a very different thing from the torturing of them—outlived the penal laws concerning them.^[561] The Rev. John Brown of Haddington (1703–1791)^[561] complained of the repeal of King James’s Act,^[562] and even John Wesley (1722–1787) declared that giving up witchcraft is, in effect, giving up the Bible.^[563] On page 366 of the journal^[564] which he edited we read: “With my latest breath will I bear testimony against giving up to infidels one great proof of the invisible world. I mean that of witchcraft and apparitions, confirmed by the testimony of all ages”;^[565] and Huxley^[566] alluded to a contemporary clergyman who had been preaching diabolical agency. Nor did the actual persecutions cease altogether, and though the last legal trial in England took place in 1712^[567] (the last execution in Europe is given by Lecky^[568] as occurring in Switzerland in 1782; another authority mentions Posen,^[569] with date 1793), sporadic outrages continued in the country, and persist in a modified form to the present day.^[570] At Clonmel, Ireland, in 1895,^[571] a poor old woman was placed upon the kitchen fire by her own family and burned, so that she died from the effects.^[572] But what were once pious customs and duties had at length become crimes, and the chief mover in this latest witch trial got (to the best of my recollection) twenty years’ penal servitude.

A belief so universal as that in witchcraft must clearly be founded upon positive phenomena. It will not serve our purpose to discuss what yet unknown supernormal powers might be attained under special conditions, or how much more there may be to discover beyond X-rays and wireless telegraphy. For while old ideas as to imps and devils, brooms and black cats, were manifestly ridiculous, and although the abnormal powers, whatever they may have been, could work no rescue in the hour of need, there may be many things in heaven and earth undreamed of in our present state of knowledge. But ordinary witch cases appear to have been resolvable into the examination of—

(a) Hysterical subjects—sometimes crowds of them—who might imagine anything and accuse anybody, including themselves. Such people were (and are) often given to swallowing needles and other things, some of which found their way through the body and emerged from all parts of it.^[573] This would have been considered strong evidence of diabolical agency. Many of these would be subject to epilepsy, catalepsy—accompanied sometimes by that strange insensibility to pain^[574] which is a well-marked symptom in hysteria, and which was remarked on by the torturers—and to obscure nerve diseases generally.

(b) “Wise women,”^[575] midwives, doctors good and bad, who may, according to the custom of the times in which, as among savages, magic^[576] and medicine were inextricably mingled, have resorted to charms^[577] (as are still employed by old women to cure warts), and sometimes, doubtless, to preparing and administering actual poisons;^[578] and who, whenever anything remarkable occurred, were always liable to be accused of having in some way trafficked with the all-explaining devil.^[579] They sometimes claimed to possess the powers of witches, and tried to gain support or protection from being feared, deceiving others and often themselves as well.^[580]

(c) Private enemies,^[581] whom an accusation of witchcraft,^[582] or of any of the little group of offences^[583] which were always supposed to be closely allied with it,^[584] was the readiest way to ruin.^[585]

(d) People accused for the sake of gain by means of deliberate plots and conspiracies. Feigning to be bewitched, and naming some (known to be) innocent person as the cause of the mischief, was a mean crime that was by no means uncommon, and many flagrant instances are given of it by early criticisers.^[586]

(e) The main body of the victims.^[587] Old women who had outlived family and friends, who were helpless and solitary,^[588] ugly from age, unclean from infirmities, eccentric in wisdom, crazy with delusions, palsied in limbs, or wandering in mind.^[589] All these, or nearly half the old folks in the land, were always liable to accusation on account of their misfortunes.^[590] They were the wretched scapegoats of those times, on whom was laid whatever might befall, from epileptic fits to summer hail.^[591]

It was a crime imputed with so much ease and repelled with so much difficulty, that the powerful, whenever they wanted to ruin the weak, ... had only to accuse them of witchcraft to secure their destruction.—C. Mackay, Popular Delusions, p. 109. A certain G. Naudé, “late Library Keeper to Cardinal Mazarin,” wrote a book, entitled The History of Magic, “By way of apology for all the wise men who have unjustly been reputed magicians from the creation to the present age.” Englished by J. Davies. London, 1657.]

(f) The people denounced by prisoners under torture. As we have seen, accusation meant examination, and this had two objects: to extort a “confession” from the suspected witch, and to compel her to reveal accomplices. Some might confess at once, and did so in the hope of execution (the kind of confession required was already well known, and the more monstrous and elaborate it might be, the better would be the chance of escaping torture). Others would naturally deny taking part in abominations in which they had not engaged, and most of which were beyond possibility. And no doubt nearly all would make a long and desperate struggle against incriminating their unfortunate friends, who might, however innocent of crime, be also other people’s enemies. And so the accursed ingenuity of man was practised on these miserable victims of his ignorance and superstition. One hideous device^[592] tried by a Frankish king was to drive sharp spikes underneath the nails;^[593] this, he contended, always induced confession from the intense anguish. Very likely it did.

Other inquisitors went their own sweet way, and used all possible varieties of the question, that they might make out of the shrieks and ravings the sort of story they expected and prompted,^[594] and lash more suspects down upon the rack. No wonder, then, that persecution spread;^[595] the aged and the disordered were always there, and any one of these might be thought a witch,^[596] or find herself denounced from the torture-room—perhaps by a lifelong friend.

The readiness with which all “evidence” was acclaimed and the appalling means by which it was got together placed any abnormal person in constant peril, and will account for the enormous numbers of the implicated. Tens of thousands of victims, says Lecky,^[597] perished by the most agonising and protracted torments without exciting the faintest compassion. In a single German city they used to burn 300 witches annually.^[598] In Nancy, 800 were put to death by a judge in the course of sixteen years.^[599] Zachary Gray,^[600] who edited an edition of Hudibras, claims that during the Long Parliament 500 witches were executed each year, and that he read through a list of no less than 3000 of them.^[601] The total of Great Britain has been estimated at 30,000,^[602] and it has been estimated that during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the witch death-roll for Europe^[603] reached 200,000 people.^[604]

Perhaps the sidelights give a more graphic conception of what went on in those dark days of error. Listen to this complaint of a French writer^[605] who evidently thought he was approaching the “last days.” “Was it [sorcery] ever so much in vogue as here in this unhappy [sixteenth] century? The benches of our courts are all blackened by them; there are not sufficient magistrates to hear the cases. Our prisons are gorged with witches, and not a day passes but our warrants are ensanguined with them, and we return saddened to our homes, shocked at the ghastly and appalling things that they confess.” And in our own land, about fifty years later, we come upon a letter written to Sir Edmund Spencer in 1647: “Within the compass of two years near upon 300 witches were arraigned, and the greater part executed, in Essex and Suffolk only. Scotland swarms with them now more than ever, and persons of good quality executed daily.”^[606]

It was in Scotland, likewise, that there used to be kept a chest “locked with three severall locks and opened every fifteenth daie,”^[607] which might receive, as did the Lion’s Mouth at Venice, denunciations slipped in secretly; and that in 1661 the justices were ordered to attend certain towns to hear cases of witchcraft at least once a week.^[608]

The witch trials are ended. So far as they are concerned, we can look back from the heights of history over this vast red sea of superstition which has swallowed up such multitudes. And to think it was all so useless, so unnecessary!^[609] but yet by no means hard to be explained. The underlying and provocative phenomena had really been present in a huge number of cases (and when they were not, were fervently conceived, and so suggested, looked for, and enforced as to set up all kinds of hallucinations in the accusers and sometimes in the accused), and in default of tracing out their causes,^[610] evident or recondite, clergy and jurists, and of course the populace, gave out a false and thaumaturgical account of them. They were correct in affirming many amazing facts and phenomena (and all these persist, for nature has not changed.^[611] There are at least as many abnormal and half-mad people amongst us now as there ever were, only we treat the clearer cases kindly, and are no longer afraid of mythical influences), although these were magnified and multiplied million-fold, for Superstition is a monster that grows by feeding. They were fantastic in their fabulous explanations of them. The rest—in those cruel times when torture was as common as is cross-examination—followed quite naturally. The doctors, theological and legal, erred in their diagnosis, mistaking diseases for devils and abnormality for magic. We shall come upon this again, crass and close at hand. May the Future condemn the Present, as we now deplore the Past.