In the Devil's Snare (31 page)

THE COURT’S THIRD SESSION (2): THE TRIAL OF GEORGE BURROUGHS

The grand jury considered the case of George Burroughs on Wednesday, August 3. For the purpose of obtaining indictments, Anthony Checkley appears to have focused almost exclusively on the same evidence that had been presented by Thomas Newton at the clergyman’s May 9 examination, along with a few additions.
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Ann Jr. recalled her visions of Burroughs on April 20 and May 5, repeating what his specter had confessed about his actions in Maine and the deaths of his wives and Deodat Lawson’s family. She then reported that that very morning she had seen the ghosts of “Mis Lawson and hir daughter Ann,” who had “tould me that Mr Burroughs murthered them.” Earlier today, too, she had seen the ghost of “goodman fullers first wife,” who explained that the minister had killed her “because there was sum differance between hir husband and him.” Several adults from both inside and outside the Putnam family attested that they witnessed one or more of these visions, and that Ann had described to them “what she said she saw and hard from the Apperishtion of Mr. George Burroghs and from thos which acc[used him] for murthering of them.”

Hubbard, Walcott, and Vibber testified again about their sightings of the clergyman’s apparition before his May 9 examination. Mercy Lewis repeated her tales of Burroughs insisting that she sign his “new fashon book” and his offering her “all the kingdoms of the earth” if she would only do so, confiding as well that “he tould me I should not see his Two wifes if he could help it because I should not witnes against him.” And Mercy was clearly eager to “witness against” her former employer. When, at the same grand-jury hearing, Elizar Keyser described the strange lights that had materialized in his chimney on May 5 after his encounter with the imprisoned Burroughs at Beadle’s tavern, Mercy jumped in, interjecting, “Mr Borroughs: told her: that he made lights: in Mr Keyzers chimny.”

Perhaps the most important new testimony came from Mary Warren, who depicted for the grand jury a spectral encounter with the minister the previous month. After choking her “almost to death,” she revealed, Burroughs’s apparition “sound[ed] a Trumpett and Immediatly I saw severall com to him as namely Capt Allding Mis Cary and gooddy pudeator.” (Thus two high-status witches, one still in jail and one now at large, had readily responded to Burroughs’s signal, making it absolutely clear that he was their leader.) All the specters “urged me to goe along with them to their sacremental meeting and mr Burroughs brought to me bread to eat and wine to drink which I refuseing he did most greviously torment me,” Mary added. After hearing such accounts and two pieces of evidence about Burroughs in Maine, the grand jury issued four indictments, charging him having afflicted Betty Hubbard, Mercy Lewis, Ann Putnam Jr., and Mary Walcott on the day of his examination and “Divers other Dayes and times, as well before as after.” His victims had been “Tortured afflicted Pined Consumed wasted and Tormented,” the grand jury declared, and he had also committed “Sundrey other Acts of Witchcraft.”
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Two days later, on Friday, August 5, the judges took up what everyone recognized was
the
crucial case in the witchcraft crisis. A “vast concourse of people,” including Increase Mather, Deodat Lawson, John Hale, and perhaps Governor William Phips himself, traveled to Salem to attend the trial of the man who (as Cotton Mather put it) “had the promise of being a King in Satan’s Kingdom, now going to be Erected.” The first official part of the proceedings the spectators would have witnessed was Burroughs’s vigorous exercise of the right to reject jurors seated in his case. He used “his liberty in challenging many,” Lawson recalled twelve years later.
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Cotton Mather took particular care in following the governor’s orders to chronicle Burroughs’s trial in
Wonders of the Invisible World.
His summary of the evidence was both comprehensive and accurate (judging by the surviving documents), and his narrative supplies details of the proceedings available nowhere else. Because he knew the book would be read by people who had attended the trial, his description of the events in the courtroom is probably generally reliable. Yet Mather’s investment in supporting the verdict colored every aspect of his account, and so it must be read with an understanding of how his bias affected the story he crafted for his audience.

Recognizing that some of his readers would be skeptical about the guilt of a clergyman, and furthermore that proving Burroughs’s culpability was essential to defending the trials, Mather laced his treatment of the case with references to appropriate legal and religious authorities. He also emphasized the compelling nature and overwhelming quantity of the testimony presented against the minister. Summing up the evidence at the outset of his narrative, Mather enumerated five or six bewitched people, eight confessors, and nine witnesses to the minister’s “extraordinary Lifting, and such feats of Strength, as could not be done without a Diabolical Assistance.” In toto, “about thirty Testimonies were brought in against him,” Mather revealed, “nor were these judg’d the half of what might have been considered for his Conviction.” Even so, they were sufficient “to fix the Character of a Witch upon him according to the Rules of Reasoning, by the Judicious Gaule, in that Case directed.”
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As was customary, the trial began with statements by “the Parties Bewitched.” By pointing out that such accounts “have a room among the
Suspicions
or
Presumptions,
brought in against one Indicted for Witchcraft,” Mather indicated his familiarity with the legal arguments made by William Perkins and Richard Bernard that were discussed earlier in this book. In his summary of the oral evidence, Mather focused in particular on the testimonies that Putnam Jr., Lewis, and Warren had given to both grand and petty juries. Perhaps, too, Walcott played an important role. She was especially likely to complain of being bitten, a theme Mather stressed in his account of the trial. After the sufferers “cry’d out of
G.B.
Biting them,” he claimed, “the print of the Teeth would be seen on the flesh of the Complainers, and
just
such a Set of Teeth as
G.B.’s
would then appear upon them, which could be distinguished from those of some other mens.” Eliciting such testimony “cost the Court a wonderful deal of Trouble,” Mather observed, because the sufferers “would for a long time be taken with Fits, that made them uncapable of saying anything.” He recorded that William Stoughton asked Burroughs “who he thought hindred these Witnesses from giving their
Testimonies
?” When the defendant answered that perhaps it was the devil, Stoughton reportedly “cast him into very great Confusion” by inquiring, “How comes the Devil so loathe to have any Testimony born against you?”
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Mather also described the murdered people who appeared spectrally to the bewitched to accuse Burroughs, focusing in particular on “the Apparitions of two Women, who said, that they were
G.B.’s
two wives, and that he had been the Death of them.” Burroughs, Mather indicated, “had been infamous for the Barbarous usage of his two late Wifes, all the Country over.” Possibly such infamy made it less shocking when at the trial one of the bewitched “was cast into Horror at the Ghost of
B’s
two Deceased Wives then appearing before him, and crying for
Vengeance
against him.” At that, several others among the afflicted, who had been out of the room, were called in and “concurred in their Horror of the Apparition, which they affirmed that he had before him.” The clergyman, “much appalled,” denied he saw anything; and, Mather hastened to add (though unconvincingly), this vision in any event played no role in his conviction.
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Deodat Lawson, not surprisingly, concentrated in his account of Burroughs’s trial on similar sightings of the ghosts of his own first wife and daughter, who, Lawson noted, had died more than three years before. The afflicted “did affirm, that, when the very ghosts looked on the prisoner at the bar, they looked red, as if the blood would fly out of their faces with indignation at him,” Lawson recalled. The former military chaplain and Village cleric vividly depicted the scene: “several afflicted being before the prisoner at the bar, on a sudden they fixed all their eyes together on a certain place of the floor before the prisoner, neither moving their eyes nor bodies for some few minutes, nor answering to any question which was asked them.” Once the group trance had ended, “some being removed out of sight and hearing, they were all, one after another, asked what they saw; and they did all agree that they saw those ghosts.” Lawson, like Mather, thus disclosed that the justices had taken steps to test the visions of the afflicted by examining them separately, although the method chosen did not exclude the possibility of prearranged collusion.
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After the bewitched came the confessors. Mather stressed the significance of such testimony in the minds of “Judicious Writers,” who “have assigned it a great place in the Conviction of
Witches, when Persons are Impeached by other
notorious Witches, to be as ill as themselves.
” He revealed that these witnesses “confessed their own having been horrible
Witches,
” adding that since their confessions they too had been “terribly Tortured by the Devils and other Witches” as a consequence. Such people attested that Burroughs had attended the witch meetings; that he had supplied them with poppets and thorns to afflict others; and that “he exhorted them with the rest of the Crew, to Bewitch all
Salem Village.
” Lawson added that the confessors described “some hundreds of the society of witches, considerable companies of whom were affirmed to muster in arms by beat of drum.” Burroughs summoned them to the meetings “from all quarters . . . with the sound of a diabolical trumpet,” and “did administer the sacrament of Satan to them, encouraging them to go on in their way, and they should certainly prevail.” Although Mather and Lawson did not name or otherwise identify the confessors who testified against George Burroughs, the group of eight in all likelihood comprised Abigail and Deliverance Hobbs, Ann Foster and her granddaughter, Richard Carrier, Mary Toothaker, Mary Warren, and Margaret Jacobs.
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John Hale reported that subsequently he spoke “seriously” to one of the female confessors who had described the minister’s exhortations at the Village witch meeting. “You are one that bring this man to Death, if you have charged any thing upon him that is not true, recal it before it be too late, while he is alive,” Hale told her. She responded, Hale recalled, that “she had nothing to charge her self with, upon that account.” Hale’s own possible doubts were thus assuaged, at least for the moment.
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Cotton Mather reminded his readers that the witches of Lancashire had been convicted in 1612 on no other testimony than that supplied by confessors and the bewitched. But in the case of George Burroughs, much more evidence was adduced, he observed, especially documentation of his “Preternatural Strength,” which was characteristic of some witches and could therefore be used to expose them. Although the minister was “very Puny,” he had frequently performed acts “beyond the strength of a Giant.” For example, he had held out a heavy seven-foot gun with one hand, “like a Pistol, at Arms-end.” He had also carried “whole Barrels fill’d with Malasses or Cider” from canoe to shore with no difficulty. To Increase Mather, at least, such tales appeared to prove Burroughs’s guilt. Several persons swore at the trial, the senior Mather wrote soon afterwards, that “they saw him do such things as no man that has not a Devil to be his familiar could perform,” and he accordingly declared that he too would have voted to convict his fellow cleric.
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These convincing stories were told at Burroughs’s trial by acquaintances from Casco Bay who had known him there in the mid- to late 1680s. They— including Captain Simon Willard, the brother of Samuel Willard—primarily repeated gossip they had heard from others or even boastful statements made by the clergyman himself. For example, Captain Willard swore that in September 1689 Robert Lawrence commended Burroughs for his strength, “saying that we none of us could doe what he could doe.” Lawrence then described how the cleric could hold out a heavy gun with one hand. Burroughs had concurred, showing the others how he picked up the gun, “but: I saw him not hold it out then,” Willard conceded. The captain also reported that he had himself tried to hold the “very hevie” gun but could not do so for long even with both hands. Another story stemmed solely from one of Burroughs’s boasts. Samuel Webber attested that when he lived at Falmouth in the mid-1680s he had “heard much of the great strength” of the minister, and so he raised the subject with Burroughs one time when the clergyman came to his house. “He then told mee that he had put his fingers into the Bung of a Barrell of Malasses and lifted it up, and carryed it Round him and sett it downe againe,” Webber recounted. Burroughs’s obvious pride in his unusual strength thus came back to haunt him at his trial.
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Not until after the minister’s execution did a witness come forward who claimed to have actually
seen
Burroughs perform such feats. On September 15, Thomas Greenslade (the son of Ann Pudeator by her first marriage, perhaps seeking to win a reprieve for his mother, who had by then been convicted of witchcraft) swore that during the early fall of 1688 at Joshua Scottow’s house in Black Point he had seen Burroughs both hold out a six-foot-long gun by “putting the forefinger of his right hand into the Muzle of said gunn” and carry a “full barrell of Malasses with but two fingers of one of his hands in the bung.” Mather explained Greenslade’s belated appearance in the Salem courtroom not by a possible desire to save his mother’s life, but rather by arguing that the witness had been “over-perswaded by some Persons to be out of the way upon
G.B.’s
Tryal.” Who those reputed silent allies of the clergyman might have been is unknown, but if they existed they presumably came from Maine, as did both Greenslade and Burroughs.
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