In the Devil's Snare (34 page)
One member of this group, Mary Tyler, later described to Increase Mather the specific reasons for her confession. En route from Andover to Salem after the touch test, she declared, her brother-in-law John Bridges (husband of Mary Tyler Post Bridges) rode with her. “All along the way . . . her brother[-in-law] kept telling her that she must needs be a witch, since the afflicted accused her, and at her touch were raised out of their fits, and urging her to confess herself a witch.” On the road, she rejected his pleas, but when they had arrived in Salem Town she was taken to a room, where John Bridges and the Reverend John Emerson combined to insist that “she certainly was a witch, and that she saw the Devil before her eyes at that time (and, accordingly, the said Emerson would attempt with his hand to beat him away from her eyes).” As a result, she recalled, “she wished herself in any dungeon, rather than be so treated.” Goodman Bridges asserted that “God would not suffer so many good men to be in such an error about it, and that she would be hanged if she did not confess.” Finally, she “became so terrified in her mind that she owned, at length, almost any thing they propounded to her.”
69
After these events in early to mid-September, Robert Calef later wrote, Dudley Bradstreet, the Andover justice of the peace who had issued arrest warrants for thirty to forty of his fellow townspeople, declined to continue ordering the apprehension of more suspects. Consequently, Calef reported, Bradstreet was himself said to have bewitched nine people to death, and he was forced to flee for his own safety, along with his brother John, another local magistrate. Calef then attributed the end of the Andover accusations (as opposed to the last arrests there, which occurred sooner) to “a worthy Gentleman of Boston,” who filed a £1,000 suit against the Andover afflicted for defamation, demanding legal proof of the validity of their allegations of witchcraft against him. “From thence forward,” Calef declared, “the Accusations at Andover generally ceased.”
70
Why and how did Andover become such a focal point for the crisis? Before Joseph Ballard called in the two Salem Village witch-finders in mid-July, Andover had only one accused witch, the “usual suspect” Martha Carrier. But the witch-finding by the afflicted girls set off a chain of examinations and confessions that, in the end, produced by far the largest number of recorded accusations in 1692. Like Salem Village, Andover had been touched by the Indian wars, and the families of many of those prominent in the accounts of the witchcraft crisis produced men who served in either the first or second conflict. Andover itself was attacked on April 8, 1676, and the accused witch Mary Parker lost a son in battle the following year. Andover militiamen, like those from Salem Village, were repeatedly called upon for frontier service after 1688. The people of the town thus had good reason to fear the Indians in 1692, and so the links posited herein between the second war and the witchcraft crisis apply to Andover no less than they did elsewhere in Essex County.
71
But at the same time, they seemingly apply no more to Andover than to other places. Just as Salem Village’s divisiveness and inability to resolve its conflicts internally made it a likely progenitor of the witchcraft crisis, so Andover’s opposite mentalité led its residents to perpetuate the crisis, once the chain of confessions began. In the Village, long-standing feuds and disagreements had familiarized townspeople with continual dissent and discord, with people who refused to do as they were asked (in this case, confess to witchcraft after being accused), and, most notably, with unresolvable conflicts because of the lack of meaningful local authority. Residents of Andover, a separate jurisdiction with its own government, were accustomed to resolving their disputes within town boundaries, and like other New Englanders they placed a heavy value on consensus, on the need for individuals to concur with the majority opinion when pressed to do so by others. The accounts of the confessing Andover women emphasize their reluctant surrender to peers and superiors—“gentlemen,” clergy, relatives—all of whom urged them to acknowledge their guilt, insisting that so many “good men” could not have erred in their judgment. Two of the confessors, for instance, later explained that they had been “press’d, and urg’d, and affrighted” until they said “anything that was desired.” Later, a group of their neighbors attested that the women had been “unreasonably” pushed by “their relations and others” to admit the truth of “that evidence that was so much credited and improved against people.” In the end, then, the women (and some men) gave in to the larger group, as seventeenth-century New Englanders were expected to do.
72
Another, related dynamic also lay behind the Andover confessions. A careful reading of the surviving records reveals the crucial significance of confessions by children and youths (below the age of twenty-five) both in confirming earlier identifications of witches and in creating new ones. When Richard, Andrew, Sarah, and Thomas Carrier Jr. all confessed and implicated their mother, that seemed to verify testimony against her by other witnesses. The same was later true of William Barker Jr. and the children of Abigail Faulkner, Mary Bridges, and Mary Tyler. Furthermore, as the preceding narrative has suggested, young people seemed especially likely to identify as witches not only “them that are [already] brought out” (as Elizabeth Johnson Sr. put it on September 1) but also to mention others for the first time. Thus Betty Johnson, the Post-Bridges sisters, and William Barker Jr. all supplied the names of new suspected witches. These unmarried Andover young people, like their parents and unlike the afflicted girls of Salem Village (who gloried in saying “no,” if only to the devil), obediently did as they were told. Directed by the magistrates to confess, they readily did so. Their mothers, aunts, fathers, and uncles sometimes initially resisted the demands for confession, but they did not. Dutifully, they acknowledged their culpability and that of others. Ironically, precisely because they behaved like ideal New England children, they—in company with the afflicted, who went to the opposite extreme—helped to cause the executions of several Andover residents.
ADDRESS OF 259 INHABITANTS OF NEW HAMPSHIRE TO KING WILLIAM AND QUEEN MARY, AUGUST 10, 1692
73
Wee humbly presume to lay before your Majesties our present deplorable Condition, vizt, That wee are but foure poore towns dayly Exposed to annoyance from French and Indian Enemies, who have already made such incursions upon us that many have bin destroyed, and the rest reduced to such Extream poverty and want, that wee are no longer able to subsist of our selves, much less to support a distinct and seperate Government. Our present standing being by the assistance of our Neighbours of the Massachusetts who are at a Charge of keeping a constant number of Soldiers among us for our Defence, and without the Continuance thereof, Wee shall be Exposed to ruine, or necessitated to quit the Province to the enemy to save our own lives.
CHAPTER EIGHT
All Sorts of Objections
SEPTEMBER 6, 1692–MAY 1693
AS THE MAGISTRATES in Andover and Salem handled the flooding cascade of confessions following the adjournment of the third ses-sion of the Court of Oyer and Terminer, criticism of the use of spectral evidence in the trials surfaced once again. This time, the caveats came not from an outsider like William Milborne but instead from a member of the council itself. Four days after the conviction of George Burroughs, Robert Pike, the militia leader and Salisbury justice of the peace who had collected much of the maleficium evidence against Susannah Martin, wrote to his fellow councilor, Jonathan Corwin, expressing his concern about the “doubtfulness and unsafety of admitting spectre testimony against the life of any that are of blameless conversation, and plead innocent.”
1
In a thoughtful letter and an enclosed essay, Pike spelled out his reasons for believing that “diabolical visions, apparitions, or representations” were “more commonly false and delusive than real, and cannot be known when they are real and when feigned, but by the Devil’s report; and then [can]not be believed, because he is the father of lies.” Pike posited three possible explanations for the spectral visions of the afflicted: first, their eyes might be “abused” and their senses “deluded,” so that they thought they saw something they really did not; second, they might see the devil himself “in the shape and likeness of a person or thing”; and third, “sometimes persons or things themselves do really appear.” Still, all that could truly be said by a witness in such a case was that “I did see the shape or likeness of such a person, if my senses or eyesight were not deluded,” because anything more would rely on Satan’s evidence. Pike acknowledged that some resolved this dilemma by insisting that “the Devil do not or cannot appear in the shape of a godly person, to do hurt.” But he pointed out that others rejected that position, leaving the issue uncertain, although it was “the very hinge upon which that weighty case depends.” For his part, Pike aligned himself with those who believed that Satan could and did assume the shape of innocent parties.
To the experienced Salisbury magistrate, the chief difficulty lay in the unreliability of any testimony about specters. He did not doubt that the afflicted and the confessors saw what they said they saw, although he acknowledged that some people think “they do but counterfeit.” (Pike’s remark constitutes the first time such a contention was committed to writing in 1692, even though he himself did not advance it.) Interpreting their visions caused the problem. Ultimately, Pike asserted, it did not matter whether the accusers were faking. “If they counterfeit, the wickedness is the greater in them, and the less in the Devil: but if they be compelled to it by the Devil, against their wills, then the sin is the Devil’s,” he told his fellow councilor. In either case, when the question of guilt turned on that evidence alone “the lives of innocent persons are alike in danger by them, which is the solemn consideration that do disquiet the country.”
In the essay he sent with his letter, Robert Pike addressed some of the legal issues involved in obtaining convictions, attempting to define what witness testimony would be sufficient to prove the guilt of a suspected witch.
2
He concluded that assessing legal adequacy was so difficult that it would be better “for the present, to let a guilty person live till further discovery, than to put an innocent person to death.” Moreover, he enumerated the various activities and claims of the Village afflicted (for instance, that they knew who was tormenting others as well as themselves, and that they saw the ghosts of the dead), pointing out that “whatsoever is done by them that is supernatural, is either divine or diabolical.” Emphatically, he insisted that “none of these actions of theirs have any warrant in God’s word.” Thus, for example, the afflicted were acting in an “utterly unlawful” way when they conversed with ghosts. The devil, not God, was torturing them; and just as surely the devil was creating their visions. Although the Salisbury councilor did not say so explicitly, he implied that in their involvement with the supernatural and the diabolical, the afflicted themselves might be verging on, or actually engaging in, witchcraft.
The “last and greatest question,” Pike asserted, was a simple one: how could they know that the devil was not acting without any human involvement at all? Satan, he insisted, “is always the doer, but whether abetted in it by anybody is uncertain.” And how would one determine whether a witch was involved? Was the devil “a competent witness” who could be relied on to reveal his accomplices? As for other potential witnesses, the afflicted could only convey knowledge that came from the devil. The confessors, indeed, could testify against themselves, but when they named another witch who denied culpability, their information too came from the devil and had to be judged untrustworthy.
He concluded with three arguments he must have regarded as clinching his case. Why would someone, he asked, plead innocence and simultaneously act witchcraft “in the sight of all men, when they know their lives lie at stake by doing it[?] Self-interest teaches every one better.” Second, why would the devil accuse his own witches? “They are a considerable part of his kingdom, which would fall, if divided against itself.” Finally, Pike admitted that sometimes God through his providence would reveal hidden things. But he had just proved that in this case the knowledge came from Satan, not from God. Here, “where the Devil is accuser and witness,” what reliance could possibly be placed on any of it?
How many other people agreed with Robert Pike is not clear. But such sentiments as his were certainly beginning to circulate in Massachusetts by mid-August. Another member of the council, John Foster, took those ideas seriously enough to ask Cotton Mather for his current opinion about “the horrible witchcrafts among us.” On August 17, Mather responded by reiterating his previous positions: that spectral evidence alone was inadequate for conviction and that the devil could appear in the shape of an innocent person, but nevertheless that “a very great use is to be made of the spectral impressions upon the sufferers.” Such visions, Mather wrote, “justly introduce, and determine, an inquiry into the circumstances of the person accused, and they strengthen other presumptions.” In the trials thus far, God’s “encouraging presence” had been evident with the “excellent judges,” for “scarce any, if at all any, have been tried before them, against whom God has not strangely sent in other, and more human and most convincing, testimonies.” Mather thus continued to insist, as surely did the judges as well, that no one had been convicted solely on the basis of spectral evidence, and that the visions of the afflicted served primarily to initiate “presumptions” that then produced the more extensive investigations that unearthed the legal proof essential to affirm guilt. He did retreat from one of his earlier positions, however, conceding that perhaps Satan could “impose upon some harmless people” through tests of “look or touch” as well as through the appearance of apparitions. Whatever Foster and the other councilors decided, Mather concluded, they should above all endeavor to “strengthen the hands of our honorable judges in the great work before them.”
3
The examining magistrates—Hathorne, Gedney, Corwin, Higginson— responded to the concerns of such councilors as Pike and Foster (and undoubtedly other critics as well) by posing leading questions to willing confessors about some of the aspects of the proceedings that were clearly arousing negative comment. For example, on August 25 Sarah Bridges was asked “what She thought of the afflicted whether they Ware witches,” as Pike had implied in his letter to Corwin. She replied, “no they were Honest persons that helped to bring out the witches.” The examination records did not always record the inquiries, but their content can readily be deduced from confessors’ reported statements. On August 29, William Barker Sr.’s interrogation probably proceeded thus, with posited questions in brackets: “[What do the witches say about the afflicted people?] The witches are much disturbed with the afflicted persones because they are descovered by them, [What do they say about the judges?] They curse the Judges Because their Society is brought under, [Are the afflicted people themselves guilty of witchcraft?] They wold have the afflicted persones counted as witches but he thinks the afflicted persones are Innocent & that they doe god good service [Has any innocent person been accused?] And that he has not known or heard of one innocent persone taken up & put in prisone.”
4
The rising chorus of criticism caused Mather to decide to undertake a systematic defense of the trials, one that through publication would reach many more people than he had hitherto spoken to or corresponded with. By September 2, he had completed a partial draft of his book, which he sent to Lieutenant Governor William Stoughton. Expressing the hope that he could “help very much to flatten that fury which we now so much turn upon one another,” Mather requested permission to publish accounts of some of the trials, “which being inserted in this treatise will much vindicate the country, as well as the judges and juries.” He also asked Stoughton to correct any errors in the draft, especially with respect to “the jealousies among us, of innocent people being accused.” And, finally, he expressed the hope that Stoughton, or perhaps “the judges jointly,” would endorse his project “in a line or two” that he could include in the book. Whether the chief judge altered any of Mather’s original language is not known, but he apparently directed Stephen Sewall to provide the minister with the necessary court documents, and he also expressed his official approbation of
The Wonders of
the Invisible World when it appeared later in the fall.
5
On September 5, Governor Phips, recently returned from Maine (where since August 11 he had been supervising the construction of Fort William Henry at Pemaquid), presided over the first meeting of the council in more than a month. The next day, the Court of Oyer and Terminer reconvened in Salem for its fourth session. A new set of petty jurors was impaneled for these trials, perhaps because George Burroughs had challenged so many men at his.
6
THE FINAL SESSION OF THE COURT OF OYER AND TERMINER
What turned out to be the last session of the court—although the judges could not have known it at the time—stretched over two weeks. Between Tuesday, September 6, and Saturday, September 17, with a two-day break on Sunday and Monday the 11th and 12th, the grand jury heard fifteen cases and the petty jury or juries tried fourteen defendants. For the first time, confessors were among those who faced trial. Yet in most ways these proceedings resembled all the others. Everyone charged was indicted for at least one offense, and everyone tried was convicted.
7
The first to face the trial jury was Dorcas Hoar, the “usual suspect” from Beverly who had been indicted on July 2. Four afflicted people, supported by adult Putnam men, attested to the agonies they and others had experienced at Hoar’s examination on May 2 and thereafter. All the depositions elided the issue of whether any torments had predated that event, as had also been true in the prosecution of Sarah Wilds. Most of the testimony came from Hoar’s Beverly neighbors. They described her fortune-telling activities (she seems to have specialized in accurately predicting that apparently healthy children “would not live Long”), her anger when crossed, and a young man’s belief that Hoar, Wilds, and other witches had formed a “Confederacy” to attack him two years earlier. One of the most persuasive witnesses for the prosecution was surely John Hale, who reported his discussions with Dorcas about her fortune-telling over a period of years, and his own now-dead daughter’s suspicions (which he had attempted to assuage) that Goody Hoar was bewitching her. His testimony revealed that Dorcas Hoar had continued to tell fortunes long after she had assured him that she had “renounce[d], or reject[ed] all such practices.”
8
Two other women who had been indicted previously were also tried during that first week of the court session. On Thursday, September 8, Martha Corey (jailed since late March, indicted in August) finally faced the judges. Perhaps the most important testimony came from Edward Putnam and Ezekiel Cheever, who together recounted their conversation with her on March 12 and vividly depicted the sufferings of the afflicted at her examination. Putnam also testified alone, describing the torments endured by Ann Jr. and Mercy Lewis when Corey called at Thomas Putnam’s household. Ann Carr Putnam probably repeated orally the testimony she had already given against Rebecca Nurse, in which she attested to her sufferings at the hands of the specters of Nurse and Corey on March 18. The other key witnesses would have been the confessors who had listed Goody Corey as a participant in various malefic activities, especially the meetings led by George Burroughs (Mary Warren, Deliverance Hobbs, and Richard Carrier). The extant documents contain no reports of traditional maleficium, so it is not clear whether any such evidence emerged orally at the trial.
9
The next day, Mary Towne Easty too had to defend herself against what must have been the difficult-to-refute testimony of adults who described sufferings of young people—in her case, those of Mercy Lewis on May 20, as well as of all the afflicted at her second examination on May 23. The depictions of Lewis’s agonies were particularly heartrending, as eight men (including Mercy’s uncle, James Darling) recalled in detail the maidservant’s “sad condition the greatest part of the day being in such tortors as no toungue can express” and her repeated pleas to God either to save her from death or to offer her soul salvation. Two witnesses also told maleficium stories about Goody Easty. The defendant did the best she could to exonerate herself, imploring the judges to intervene on her behalf and to “councell” her on her case. She submitted statements from jailers in both Ipswich and Boston declaring that she had behaved herself in a “Sobor and civell” manner while in custody. She also called as character witnesses her children, her pastor, and various members of the Topsfield church. And, drawing on the arguments then being advanced by critics of the trials about the overreliance on spectral evidence, she requested that “the Testimony of witches, or such as are afflicted, as is supposed, by witches” might not be regarded as definitive “without legal evidence concurring” against someone like herself, who had “for many yeares Lived under the unblemished reputation of Christianity.”
10
The other cases heard that week involved grand-jury proceedings as well as trials. On Wednesday, September 7, the grand jury formally charged Alice Parker with bewitching Warren and Walcott, and she seems to have been tried later that same day. Remarkably, the indictments were based not (as was usual) on afflictions during her examination, but rather on tortures her specter had recently visited upon her victims. According to mutually supportive depositions offered to both inquest and petty juries by five of the sufferers, Parker’s apparition had attacked them all, along with two others, the previous night. As the first to accuse Goody Parker, Mary Warren not surprisingly contributed the most detailed account, alleging that Parker “brought: me a poppit: & a needle: & thretned: to stab: me if I would not stick the needle into the Poppit: & she did run: the needle a little way into me.” Warren also repeated the charges she had first advanced on May 12, claiming that Parker’s specter had confessed to causing four deaths at sea as well as to bewitching Mary’s own mother and sister. Finally, several of Goody Parker’s neighbors recounted maleficium tales dating back to 1684.
11
On September 7 the grand jury in addition considered the case against Ann Greenslade Pudeator (also originally accused by Mary Warren on May 12). The widow Pudeator was then tried on Saturday, September 10. Only one indictment survives, charging her with afflicting Warren during her second examination on July 2. Four of the afflicted and two confessors testified to either the grand or petty jury or both that they and the others had been afflicted by Goody Pudeator then and at other times, and that they “verily” believed she was a witch. Warren again took the lead, swearing that Pudeator’s specter had confessed to killing her husband and his first wife, along with the wife of John Best. Best himself (seconded by his son, John Jr.) supported that allegation, attesting that he “did often hear my wife saye that Ann pudeater would not Lett her alone untill she had killd her By her often pinching & Bruseing of her Till her Earms & other parts of her Body Looked Black . . . & [she] stood in the Belefe of itt as Long as she Lived.” After her conviction and condemnation, Ann Pudeator petitioned the judges, complaining that the Bests’ testimony was “altogether false & untrue,” as was that of the two confessors, and futilely asking that “my life may not be taken away by such false Evidence and wittnesses as these be.”
12
The other case wholly resolved during the first week of the September court session was that of Mistress Mary Bradbury. As has been seen, Mistress Bradbury had been identified by confessors as one of the main instigators of the tormenting of Timothy Swan. At the grand-jury proceeding on Friday the 9th, five witnesses described how her specter tortured them during her July 2 examination. Both Mary Walcott and Ann Putnam Jr. revealed that they had seen the ghost of John Carr (Ann’s uncle) accusing Mistress Bradbury of killing him, attesting as well that they had seen her apparition afflicting Swan. The grand jury indicted her for bewitching Swan on July 26 and Sarah Vibber on July 2.
13
At the trial later that same day, the petty jury considered the evidence already heard by the grand jury as well as additional testimony.
14
The confessors who named Mary Bradbury would have been brought in to repeat their identifications—both Mary Laceys and Richard Carrier, certainly, and perhaps Mary Toothaker. One witness declared that he thought Mistress Bradbury had bewitched a ship on which he sailed to the West Indies about eleven years earlier, and Richard Carr (Ann Jr.’s uncle) swore that he, his father, and another observer (who also testified) believed that years earlier they had seen Bradbury turn herself into a spectral “blue boar” that then attacked their horses. Richard’s brother, James, attested that in the early 1670s he had become strangely ill for nine months after a courtship visit to the young widow Rebecca Wheelwright Maverick. Rebecca had “most curtuously” invited him to “com oftener” to her house, James recalled, thus suggesting that he was a preferred suitor. When he called next, James told the jury, the defendant’s son William was also there, but Rebecca Maverick “did so corsely treat the said william Bradbery that he went away semeing to be angury.” James then became sick, and, as everyone in the courtroom knew, during his extended illness Rebecca married William Bradbury.
James Carr did not have to spell out for the jury the inference he drew from that chain of events: Mistress Bradbury, wanting her son to obtain the widow Maverick for himself, had bewitched his rival James so that William would have a clear field. James drove home his point by informing the jury that a doctor had pronounced him “behaged” because medications did not appear to improve his condition. After James identified Mistress Bradbury as a suspect, the doctor had exclaimed that “he did beleve that mis Bradbery was a grat deall worse then goody [Susannah] mertin.” Not until after James successfully struck a spectral cat that appeared in his bedroom one night did his health improve. “I beleve in my hart,” he concluded, “that mis Bradbery the prisoner att the bar has often afflected me by acts of wicthcraft.”
To counter such evidence of afflictions and maleficium Mistress Bradbury offered a sworn statement from her current pastor attesting to her good character and to her “works of charity & mercy to the sick & poor.” Robert Pike, who prepared that deposition, added his own affirmation that he had known Mary “upward of fifty years” and fully concurred with the clergyman’s judgment. Pike’s son John, a minister, joined in the same positive assessment of her character. One hundred fifteen Salisbury townspeople submitted a petition on her behalf. Mistress Bradbury herself addressed the judges directly, insisting that “I am wholly inocent of any such wickedness . . . I am the servant of Jesus Christ & Have given my self up to him as my only lord & saviour.” The devil’s works, she declared, were “horid & detestible”; she had tried to live her life “according to the rules of [God’s] holy word.” But, like all the other defenses accused witches offered to the Court of Oyer and Terminer, hers fell on deaf ears.
15
Although the petty jury’s work that week ended with the trial of Mary Bradbury, the grand jury considered three more cases: those of Giles Corey, Abigail Hobbs, and Rebecca Jacobs, the daughter-in-law of the executed witch George Jacobs Sr. Ann Putnam Jr. and Mercy Lewis both swore to having been afflicted by Corey’s specter in mid-April; other afflicted witnesses attested that he had tortured them at unspecified times. A Village maidservant, seconded by Walcott, revealed that she had seen Giles’s apparition sitting in his regular seat in the meetinghouse during a lecture on the day before Bridget Bishop’s execution (June 9). John DeRich described appearances of his specter on August 20 and September 5, indicating that Corey wanted to borrow “some platers” from him to use for “afeast.” Since no indictments survive in this case, it is not clear what true bills the grand jury issued, but there must have been at least one.
16
Rebecca Jacobs and Abigail Hobbs had both confessed to being witches, the latter having done so repeatedly in a variety of settings. The grand jury thus probably found it easy to indict Hobbs for bewitching Mercy Lewis during her April examination, and for in 1688 “in Cascoe Bay in the Province of Mayne in New England Wickedly and Felloniously” covenanting with “the Evill Spirritt the Devill.” The teenager was then tried and convicted the following week, based on her own confession, testimony by the afflicted, and statements she had earlier made to acquaintances about her dealings with the devil. But Rebecca Jacobs’s case posed greater difficulty. The defendant’s mother, Rebecca Fox, petitioned the court, describing her daughter as “a Woman broken & distracted in her mind” for more than twelve years. She asked the judges to pay “due regard” to Rebecca’s insanity (to which she and others were prepared to swear) “that so there may not be stresse laid on the Confession of a Distracted Woman to the Prejudice of her life.” And the grand jury did take that plea into account. Although they charged Rebecca Jacobs with afflicting Betty Hubbard during her examination, they refused to indict her for covenanting with the devil.
17
On Sunday, September 11, during the court’s brief hiatus, the Reverend Samuel Parris used both his morning and afternoon sermons to reflect on “the condemnation of 6 Witches at a Court at Salem,” one of them being Martha Corey, a member of his own church. His text, Revelation 17:14, spoke of a “War with the Lamb” but predicted God’s ultimate triumph. “In our dayes,” Parris asserted, “How industrious & vigorous is the Bloody French Monarch, & his Confederates against Christ & his Interest.” In this very land “& some neighbouring Places,” he asked his listeners rhetorically, “how many, what Multitudes, of Witches & Wizards had the Devil instigated with utmost violence to attempt the overthrow of Religion?” The two sermons abounded in martial terminology, as Parris discussed Satan’s “Army,” wartime “Captive[s],” and “good Souldiers of Christ.” In keeping with the theme, he insisted, “Here are no Newters. Every one is on one side or the other.” Parris’s depiction of the witches’ assaults in terms that summoned up images of attacks by the Indians and French must have sent shivers of fear through his audience—fear for their lives and for their souls. Parris warned the congregation of internal as well as external enemies. Previously, witches had been found only in “Barbarous Desarts” (Cotton Mather employed a similar phrase to describe the Maine forests, and Parris probably meant the same), but now they were common in “the Civilest & Religious Parts.” His remark about “so many of this Damned brood” of witches having been found “in a Village of 14 Houses in the North” (surely Falmouth, home to George Burroughs and Deliverance and Abigail Hobbs) only underscored the danger of the combined threats from the visible and invisible worlds.
18