The scene presented on this occasion must have been truly impressive at the time, as it is shocking to us in the retrospect. The action of the church, at the close of the morning service, of course became universally known; and the "great and spacious meeting-house" was thronged by a crowd that filled every nook and corner of its floor, galleries, and windows. The sheriff and his subordinates brought in the prisoner, manacled, and the chains clanking from her aged form. She was placed in the broad aisle. Mr. Higginson and Mr. Noyes—the elders, as the clergy were then called—were in the pulpit. The two ruling elders—who were lay officers—and the two deacons were in their proper seats, directly below and in front of the pulpit. Mr. Noyes pronounced the dread sentence, which, for such a crime, was then believed to be not merely an expulsion from the church on earth, but an exclusion from the church in heaven. It was meant to be understood as an eternal doom. As it had been proved, in his estimation, beyond a question, that she had given her soul to the Devil, he delivered her over to the great adversary of God and man.
From the dismal cell, which, for but a few days longer, was to hold her body, he proclaimed the transferrence of her soul to—
"A dungeon horrible on all sides round,
As one great furnace flamed; yet from those flames
No light, but rather darkness visible;
Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace
And rest can never dwell; hope never comes
That comes to all; but torture without end,
As far removed from God, and light of heaven,
As from the centre thrice to the utmost pole."
Language and imagery, exhausting the resources of the divine genius of the greatest of poets, fail to give expression to what was felt to be the import of this fearful sentence. It sunk the recipient of it below the reach of human sympathy. She was regarded, by that blinded multitude, with a horror that cast out pity, and was full of hate. But in our view now, and, as we believe, in the view of God and angels then, she occupied an infinite height above her persecutors. Her mind was serenely fixed upon higher scenes, and filled with a peace which the world could not take away, or its cruel wrongs disturb. She went back to her prison walls, and then to the scaffold, with a pious and humble faith which has not failed to be recorded among men, as it has been rewarded where the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest.
Calef, as already quoted, gives the impression produced by her demeanor at her death. Hutchinson expresses in the following words the judgment of history and the sense of all coming times:—
"Mr. Noyes, the minister of Salem, a zealous prosecutor, excommunicated the poor old woman, and delivered her to Satan, to whom he supposed she had formally given herself up many years before; but her life and conversation had been such, that the remembrance thereof, in a short time after, wiped off all the reproach occasioned by the civil or ecclesiastical sentence against her."
It is impossible to close the story of the lot assigned to this good woman by an inscrutable Providence, without again contemplating it in a condensed recapitulation. In her old age, experiencing a full share of all the delicate infirmities which the instincts of humanity require to be treated with careful and reverent tenderness, she was ruthlessly snatched from the bosom of a loving family reared by her pious fidelity in all Christian graces, from the side of the devoted companion of her long life, from a home that was endeared by every grateful association and comfort; immured in the most wretched and crowded jails; kept loaded with irons and bound with cords for months; insulted and maligned at the preliminary examinations; outraged in her person by rough and unfeeling handling and scrutiny; and in her rights, by the most flagrant and detestable judicial oppression, by which the benefit of a verdict, given in her favor, had been torn away; carried to the meeting-house to receive the sentence of excommunication in a manner devised to harrow her most sacred sentiments; and finally carted through the streets by a route every foot of which must have been distressing to her infirm and enfeebled frame; made to ascend a rough and rocky path to the place of execution, and there consigned to the hangman. Surely, there has seldom been a harder fate.
Her body was probably thrown with the rest into a hole in the crevices of the rock, and covered hastily and thinly over by the executioners. It has been the constant tradition of the family, that, in some way, it was recovered; and the spot is pointed out in the burial-place belonging to the estate, where her ashes rest by the side of her husband, and in the midst of her children. It is certain, that, at least, one other body was thus exhumed, and taken to its own proper place of burial. From the known character of Francis Nurse and his sons and sons-in-law, we may be sure that what others could do they did not suffer to remain undone. It is left to the imagination to present the details of the sad and secret enterprise. In the darkness of midnight, they found and identified the body, and bore it tenderly in their arms along the silent roads and by-ways, across fields and over fences, to the old home, where it was received by the assembled family, mourned over, and cared for; and, during that or the ensuing night, deposited, with tears and prayers, in their own consecrated grounds. Her descendants of successive generations owned and reverently guarded the spot. They own and guard it to-day. The interesting reminiscences connected with the early history of the Nurse house have been alluded to. It has witnessed an extraordinary variety of the conditions of domestic vicissitude. Scenes rising before the mind in contemplative retrospection, while gazing upon it, present the extremest contrasts of human experience. On the evening of the 25th of October, 1678, Mary and Elizabeth Nurse were married. Such an occurrence was undoubtedly the occasion of the highest joy and gladness in a happy household. The old mansion shone in light, and echoed voices of cheer. How altered its aspect! What darkness and silence brooded over and within it, while those same daughters waited, watched, and listened, through the solemn hours of that night of woe and horror, for the coming of their father, husbands, and brothers, bearing to the home, from which she had been so cruelly torn, the remains of their slaughtered mother!
The subsequent history of the house presents a circumstance of singular interest in connection with our story. All the members of the three branches of the Putnam family, with the exception of Joseph, seem to have been carried away by the witchcraft delusion, in its early stages, and were more or less active in pushing on the prosecutions. We have seen how fierce was the maniac testimony of Mrs. Ann Putnam and her daughter against Rebecca Nurse. The lapse of time, by a Providence that wonderfully works its ends, has repaired the breaches made by folly and wrong. The descendants of the numerous family of Mrs. Ann Putnam have disappeared from the scene: none of them bearing the name are in the village. The descendants of Deacon Edward Putnam have also scattered in emigration to other places. Nathaniel and John, the heads of the other two branches of the family, although involved in the witchcraft delusion, each signed papers in favor of Rebecca Nurse; their descendants, as well as those of Joseph, are still numerous in the village, hold their old position of respectability and influence, and many of them occupy the lands of their ancestors. Stephen, the grandson of Nathaniel, married Miriam, the grand-daughter of John. Their son Phinehas, in 1784, bought the Nurse homestead from Benjamin Nurse, the great-grandson of Rebecca. Orin Putnam, the great-grandson of Phinehas, to whom the estate descends, married in 1836 the daughter of Allen Nurse, a direct descendant of Rebecca, and placed her at the head of her old ancestral homestead. The children of that marriage, with their father and grandfather, constitute the family that dwell in and own the venerable mansion. This singular restoration, suggesting such pleasing sentiments, adds another to the remarkable elements of interest belonging to the history of the [Townsend-Bishop House].
The descendants of Francis and Rebecca Nurse are numerous, and have honorably perpetuated the name. Among them may be mentioned the Rev. Peter Nurse, a graduate of Harvard College in 1802, for some years librarian of that institution, an excellent scholar, and long universally respected as a clergyman; and Amos Nurse, a graduate of the same college in 1812,—an eminent physician connected with the medical faculty of Bowdoin College, a man of distinguished talent and influence in public affairs, and senator in Congress from the State of Maine.