In the Devil's Snare (5 page)

Samuel Willard in 1671 thus displayed a willingness to question the sorts of statements and behaviors that many Bay Colony magistrates and ministers failed to challenge twenty-one years later. His skepticism indicates that their later credulity need not be seen as the only possible contemporary response to the affliction of young people, and that some explanation of that credulity is required. As the introduction suggested, the impact of the ongoing conflict with the Wabanakis provides much of the necessary explanation, as will become evident in this book’s later chapters.

In 1692 those wishing to combat the afflictions in Essex County were well aware of the Groton and Tocutt incidents, but they saw two other reports of afflictions published in the 1680s as constituting the most appropriate precedents for their actions. In Groton and Tocutt, ministers concluded that Satan was attacking his targets directly, without human intervention. Accordingly, the clergymen themselves dealt with the victims, and legal actions were never pursued (mere mortals, after all, could not arrest the devil and charge him with a crime). In Salem Village, by contrast, residents rapidly concluded that human agents—one or more witches, and not Satan’s direct operations—had caused the afflictions. First Dr. William Griggs diagnosed bewitchment rather than a natural ailment, and then the sufferers named suspects who credibly fit known profiles of witches. When the case thereafter moved quickly into the hands of the magistrates, the relevant precedents became those involving legal rather than spiritual methods of combating afflictions.

Cotton Mather wrote about both earlier incidents. In 1688, he helped to treat the Goodwin children of Boston, the following year describing their torments at length in
Memorable Providences.
Later, when the first phase of the Salem proceedings ended, he included a substantial summary of the other case in
Wonders of the Invisible World,
his defense of the trials. As Mather pointed out (and John Hale concurred), a 1662 witchcraft prosecution in Bury St. Edmunds, England, described in a book printed two decades later, was “much considered by the Judges of
New England.”
Presided over by Sir Matthew Hale, who was widely known to be reluctant to convict witches without adequate evidence, the Bury St. Edmunds trial seemed to many the closest parallel to the Essex County episode. In the 1662 English case, Mather asserted, we “see the
Witchcrafts
here most exactly resemble the
Witchcraft
there; and we may learn what sort of Devils do trouble the World.”
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The Bury St. Edmunds trial involved seven children and teenagers, six of them girls, from Lowestoft, Suffolk, who claimed to have been bewitched by two local widows, Rose Cullender and Amy Denny. None of the complainants, who came from four different families, testified at the trial; one was thought too young and the others too ill. Three attended the proceedings, but “fell into strange and violent fits, screeking out in a most sad manner, so that they could not in any wise give any Instructions in the Court who were the Cause of their Distemper.” A learned doctor testified that “he was clearly of Opinion, that the persons were Bewitched.” Parents and other relatives spoke for the young people, describing the tortures they had endured, including “feeling most extream pain in her Stomach, like the pricking of Pins”; experiencing convulsions, lameness, and “sometimes a soreness over their whole Bodies”; occasionally being unable to speak or hear; and vomiting up pins and nails. Furthermore, the afflicted complained of seeing the apparitions of Denny and Cullender, “to their great terrour and affrightment.” Discerning the specters “sometimes in one place and sometimes in another,” the girls would run to them, and “striking at them as if they were present,” would be in turn “derid[ed] and threatn[ed]” by the apparitions. Once, one of the younger children “ran round about the House holding her Apron, crying
hush, hush,
as if there had been some Poultrey in the House,” but the deponent (her aunt) “could perceive nothing.”
⁵⁷

A notable aspect of the Bury St. Edmunds trial was its use of the same touch test employed by Samuel Willard in 1671. Judge Hale ordered Amy Denny to touch the hand of an eleven-year-old complainant as she lay “as one wholly senseless in a deep Sleep” on a table in the courtroom. At that “the Child without so much as seeing her, for her Eyes were closed all the while, suddenly leaped up . . . and with her Nails scratched her till Blood came” and had to be pulled away from Denny, still making “signs of Anger.” Other tests were undertaken while the afflicted were “in the midst of their Fitts,” with fists closed “in such manner, as that the strongest Man in the court could not force them open.” Yet at Rose Cullender’s “least touch . . . they would suddenly shriek out opening their hands, which accident could not happen by the touch of any other person.”
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Not everyone, however, was convinced, and so one of the girls was taken aside, blindfolded, and touched by a randomly selected person. When
that
“produced the same effect” as the witch’s touch, some leading barristers pronounced the bewitchment “a meer Imposture.” But the girl’s father explained that since—when his daughters came out of their fits—they turned out to have known everything that had happened in the interim, the apparently failed test should not be interpreted in that manner. Rather, it should be taken as “a confirmation that the Parties were really Bewitched” because “the Maid might be deceived by a suspition that the Witch touched her when she did not.” In the end, his argument (which even Cotton Mather found dubious) carried the day. The observers concluded, as did most of those in Essex County thirty years later, that “it is not possible that any should counterfeit such Distempers, . . . much less Children; and for so long time, and yet undiscovered by their Parents and Relations.”
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During the three-day trial, neighbors offered maleficium tales to supplement the reports of afflictions. After the defendants had been given a chance to respond to the charges, Sir Matthew Hale instructed the jury that they had to answer two questions: Were the children bewitched? Had the prisoners done it? “That there were such Creatures as
Witches
he made no doubt at all,” he informed the jurors, both because the scriptures said so and because “the wisdom of all Nations” (including the laws of England) declared witchcraft to be a crime. He then admonished them that
“to Condemn the Innocent, and
to let the Guilty go free, were both an Abomination to the Lord.”
The jury took just thirty minutes to convict the women. Soon thereafter, the afflictions ceased, and the next day the young people were able to affirm to the court the truth of “what before hath been Deposed by their Friends and Relations.” Amy Denny and Rose Cullender were hanged three days later, still refusing to confess.
⁶⁰

The introduction prepared by the anonymous editor of
A Tryal of Witches
reveals one reason why the Bury St. Edmunds case took on such importance in the thinking of people in Essex County in 1692. Sir Matthew Hale, he declared, was a jurist notable for “his Integrity, Learning, and Law, . . . who not only took a great deal of paines, and spent much time in this Tryal himself; but had the Assistance and Opinion of several other very Eminent and Learned Persons.” New Englanders revered Hale, who later became Lord Chief Justice and who authored influential treatises on the law, not only for his jurisprudence but also for his sincere piety. Although a member of the Church of England, he was noted for his religiosity and for his close friendship with the well-known Puritan divine Richard Baxter. Therefore, New Englanders, like the anonymous editor, could well conclude that
A Tryal of
Witches
was “the most perfect Narrative of any thing of this Nature hitherto Extant” and turn to Hale’s precedents for guidance at a time of crisis. Those precedents allowed the admission of testimony about the spectral affliction of children and teenagers, coupled such accounts with traditional stories of the bewitchment of humans and livestock, and employed a touch test to help determine guilt—all elements that were to play a major role in the Salem convictions. New England magistrates might not be noted for their legal learning (none were trained lawyers), but the great Sir Matthew Hale himself seemed to legitimate their conduct of the trials.
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The other obvious precedent lay much closer to Salem in both time and space. Four of the six children of the pious Boston mason John Goodwin began suffering from fits during the summer of 1688. The Reverend Joshua Moodey of Boston’s Third Church described the children (aged five to thirteen, two boys and two girls) as “grievously tormented, crying out of head, eyes, tongue, teeth breaking their neck, back, thighs, knees, legs, feet, toes etc. & then they roar out, Oh my head, oh my neck.” Their cries were “most dolorous and affecting,” Moodey recounted, but when the pain passed (usually in about an hour) they could “eat, drink, walk play, laugh as at other times.” In Cotton Mather’s opinion as expressed in his narrative of the incidents in
Memorable Providences,
“the whole Temper and Carriage” of the children rendered it unlikely that they would “Dissemble,” and furthermore “it was perfectly impossible for any Dissimulation of theirs to produce what scores of spectators were amazed at.”
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Investigation showed that the oldest of the four, Martha, had fallen ill first, following an argument with the family’s Irish laundress, whom Martha had accused of stealing some linen. The woman’s mother, Goody Glover, “an ignorant and scandalous old Woman” who had been described by her own husband as “undoubtedly a Witch” and who had already been accused of bewitching at least one woman to death, cursed the girl, who then started to have “strange Fits.” After her siblings too were “tortured every where in a manner so very grievous, that it would have broken an heart of stone to have seen their Agonies,” a prominent Boston doctor concluded that “nothing but an hellish Witchcraft could be the Original of these Maladies.” In spite of the urgings of some that they employ countermagic, the pious parents determined “to oppose Devils with no other weapons but Prayers and Tears.” A day of prayer at their house, held by several clergymen and devout laypeople, freed the youngest child from his fits, but the other children continued to be tormented, until the laundress and her mother were jailed. Thereafter they “had some present ease,” until one of the children was verbally assaulted by a relative of the accused women, whereupon their fits resumed.
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When questioned, Goody Glover gave “blasphemous and horrible” responses, declared Mather; and she proved incapable of correctly reciting the Lord’s Prayer no matter how many times it was repeated to her. At her trial before a court convened by the governor, Sir Edmund Andros, and headed by Joseph Dudley—and probably including three of the men who also served as judges in 1692—Glover claimed to speak only Gaelic, so she dealt with the judges through interpreters, even though “she understood the English very well,” Mather insisted. A search of her house turned up “several small Images . . . made of Raggs, and stuff’t with Goat’s hair, and other such Ingredients.” In court, Goody Glover confessed to witchcraft, demonstrating how she tortured the Goodwin children “by wetting of her Finger with her Spittle, and stroaking of those little Images.” When she grasped an image, commonly termed a poppet (or puppet), one of the children “fell into sad Fits, before the whole Assembly.” The judges, concerned about possible deception, repeated the experiment, but with the same result. Before convicting and sentencing Goody Glover to death, the court ordered a group of physicians to examine her to ensure she was not “craz’d.” After the doctors pronounced her sane, she was executed on November 16, declaring ominously that “the Children should not be relieved by her Death, for others had a hand in it as well as she.”
⁶⁴

Mather reported in
Memorable Providences
the accuracy of Goody Glover’s prediction that the Goodwins would continue to experience spectral tortures. Yet although the children eventually named other suspected witches, no further arrests and executions occurred. The children occasionally saw specters, but only rarely could they identify specific individuals as causing their afflictions. Mather observed Martha Goodwin carefully, taking her into his own home and later reflecting that her “passions” taught him more about “Demoniacs” than did “all my Library.” And others too had been instructed by her sufferings, because the Goodwin household had been “visited by all sorts of Persons” who witnessed the children’s torments. To Mather, the lesson was clear: only the “Ignorant” would insist on “a Denial of Devils, or of Witches.” His colleagues in other Boston and Charlestown churches concurred. In their jointly authored introduction to
Memorable Providences,
they commented that some people doubted “whether there are any such things as Witches,” but that “no Age passes without some apparent Demonstration of it.” Mather’s book, they contended, provided “a further clear Confirmation, That, There is both a God, and a Devil, and Witchcraft: That, There is no out-ward Affliction, but what God may (and sometimes doth) permit Satan to trouble His people withal. That, The Malice of Satan and his Instruments, is very great against the Children of God.”
⁶⁵

Taken together, the Boston and Bury St. Edmunds incidents provided the magistrates of 1692 with relevant valuable precedents and models, especially when supplemented with the learned writings of English and American jurists and clergymen. The behavior of the Salem Village afflicted, far from being unique, resembled various prior counterparts; other physicians, much more distinguished than Dr. William Griggs, had pronounced children bewitched on the basis of similar evidence. That Sir Matthew Hale, known to be cautious in his handling of witchcraft cases, had found spectral testimony credible was certainly reassuring. Goody Glover, confronted in the courtroom, had confessed her guilt and demonstrated dramatically and convincingly how she employed poppets to bewitch the Goodwin children. Faced with such overwhelming evidence, who—as Cotton Mather wrote— could possibly deny the existence of witches or their malicious intent?
⁶⁶