In 1484, Pope Innocent the Eighth issued a bull encouraging and requiring the arrest and punishment of persons suspected of witchcraft. From this moment, the prosecutions became frequent and the victims numerous in every country. The very next year, forty-one aged females were consigned to the flames in one nation; and, not long after, a hundred were burned by one inquisition in the devoted valleys of Piedmont; forty-eight were burned in Ravensburg in five years; and, in the year 1515, five hundred were burned at Geneva in three months! One writer declares that "almost an infinite number" were burned for witchcraft in France,—a thousand in a single diocese! These sanguinary and horrible transactions were promoted and sanctioned by theological hatred and rancor. It was soon perceived that there was no kind of difficulty in clearing the Church of heretics by hanging or burning them all as witches! The imputation of witchcraft could be fixed upon any one with the greatest facility. In the earlier part of the fifteenth century, the Earl of Bedford, having taken the celebrated Joan of Arc prisoner, put her to death on this charge. She had been almost adored by the people rescued by her romantic valor, and was universally known among them by the venerable title of "Holy Maid of God;" but no difficulty was experienced in procuring evidence enough to lead her to the stake as a servant and confederate of Satan! Luther was just beginning his attack upon the papal power, and he was instantly accused of being in confederacy with the Devil.
In 1534, Elizabeth Barton, "the Maid of Kent," was executed for witchcraft in England, together with seven men who had been confederate with her. In 1541 the Earl of Hungerford was beheaded for inquiring of a witch how long Henry VIII. would live. In 1549 it was made the duty of bishops, by Archbishop Cranmer's articles of visitation, to inquire of their clergy, whether "they know of any that use charms, sorcery, enchantments, witchcraft, soothsaying, or any like craft invented by the Devil." In 1563 the King of Sweden carried four witches with him, as a part of his armament, to aid him in his wars with the Danes. In 1576, seventeen or eighteen were condemned in Essex, in England. A single judge or inquisitor, Remigius, condemned and burned nine hundred within fifteen years, from 1580 to 1595, in the single district of Lorraine; and as many more fled out of the country; whole villages were depopulated, and fifteen persons destroyed themselves rather than submit to the torture which, under the administration of this successor of Draco and rival of Jeffries, was the first step taken in the trial of an accused person. The application of the rack and other instruments of torment, in the examination of prisoners, was recommended by him in a work on witchcraft. He observes that "scarcely any one was known to be brought to repentance and confession but by these means"!
The most eminent persons of the sixteenth century were believers in the popular superstition respecting the existence of compacts between Satan and human beings, and in the notions associated with it. The excellent Melancthon was an interpreter of dreams and caster of nativities. Luther was a strenuous supporter of the doctrine of witchcraft, and seems to have seriously believed that he had had frequent interviews with the arch-enemy himself, and had disputed with him on points of theology, face to face. In his "Table-Talk," he gives the following account of his intimacy with the Devil: speaking of his confinement in the Castle of Wartburg, he says, "Among other things they brought me hazel-nuts, which I put into a box, and sometimes I used to crack and eat of them. In the night-times, my gentleman, the Devil, came and got the nuts out of the box, and cracked them against one of the bedposts, making a very great noise and rumbling about my bed; but I regarded him nothing at all: when afterwards I began to slumber, then he kept such a racket and rumbling upon the chamber stairs, as if many empty barrels and hogsheads had been tumbled down." Kepler, whose name is immortalized by being associated with the laws he discovered that regulate the orbits of the heavenly bodies, was a zealous advocate of astrology; and his great predecessor and master, the Prince of Astronomers, as he is called, Tycho Brahe, kept an idiot in his presence, fed him from his own table, with his own hand, and listened to his incoherent, unmeaning, and fatuous expressions as to a revelation from the spiritual world.
The following is the language addressed to Queen Elizabeth by Bishop Jewell. He was one of the most learned persons of his age, and is to this day regarded as the mighty champion of the Church of England, and of the cause of the Reformation in Great Britain. He was the terrible foe of Roman-Catholic superstition. "It may please Your Grace," says he, "to understand that witches and sorcerers within these four last years are marvellously increased within Your Grace's realm; Your Grace's subjects pine away even unto the death; their color fadeth, their flesh rotteth, their speech is benumbed, their senses are bereft. I pray God," continues the courtly preacher, "they never practise further than upon the subject." The petition of the polite prelate appears to have been answered. The virgin queen resisted inexorably the arts of all charmers, and is thought never to have been bewitched in her life.
It is probable that Spenser, in his "Faërie Queen," has described with accuracy the witch of the sixteenth century in the following beautiful lines:—
"There, in a gloomy hollow glen, she found
A little cottage built of sticks and weedes,
In homely wise, and wald with sods around,
In which a witch did dwell in loathly weedes
And wilful want, all careless of her needes;
So choosing solitarie to abide
Far from all neighbors, that her devilish deedes
And hellish arts from people she might hide,
And hurt far off unknowne whomever she envide."
So prone were some to indulge in the contemplation of the agency of the Devil and his myrmidons, that they strained, violated, and perverted the language of Scripture to make it speak of them. Thus they insisted that the word "Philistines" meant confederates and subjects of the Devil, and accordingly interpreted the expression, "I will deliver you into the hands of the Philistines," thus, "I will deliver you into the hands of demons."
I cannot describe the extent to which the superstition we are reviewing was carried about the close of the sixteenth century in stronger language than the following, from a candid and learned French Roman-Catholic historian: "So great folly," says he, "did then oppress the miserable world, that Christians believed greater absurdities than could ever be imposed upon the heathens."
We have now arrived at the commencement of the seventeenth century, within which the prosecutions for witchcraft took place in Salem. To show the opinions of the clergy of the English Church at this time, I will quote the following curious canon, made by the convocation in 1603:—