Seven miles hence, at W. B., a man in good health suddenly fell sick, pined for half a year, and then died. His wife, suspecting evil doings, went to a cunning woman, who showed her in a glass the likeness of the witch who had destroyed him, wearing an old red cap with corners, such as women were used to wear. The old red-capped woman was taken, tried, soon brought to confess to the bewitching of the man, and executed. But before she died she told them all, how that she had a spirit in the likeness of a yellow dun cat, which came to her one night as she sat by the fire nursing angry thoughts against a neighbour with whom she had fallen out. She was frightened, she said, but the cat bid her not be afraid, for it had served an old dame, that was now dead, for five years down in Kent, and would serve her now, an she would. The woman took the cat at its word, and by it killed many a cow and hog of those who angered her: at last she sent it to this man, and the cat killed him. She was hanged, and the yellow dun imp was never more seen.
Mr. Giffard knew a church which had been robbed of its communion service: a wise man told the churchwardens what to do and the thief would surely ride in all haste to confess. As it proved. Another case was that of a child taken piteously ill. Under the cunning man’s advice the father burnt its clothes, and while they were burning, the witch came running in, grievously pained. The child was well within two days. A butcher had a son, John, terribly afflicted with sores. Salves and plasters would not heal him; but when a cunning man showed him in a glass the form of the witch who had laid this harmful thing upon him, and they had cut off some of the boy’s hair and burnt it, the old woman came to the house in all speed, crying, “John, John, scratch me!” So John scratched her till the blood came, and his sores all healed of themselves, without salve or plaster helping. A woman had blear eyes that were watery; a knave lodging at the house wrote a charm which she was always to wear about her neck, and never lose or look at. She wore her charm, and her eyes got quite well; but one day, prompted by Eve’s sin, she opened the packet, and found a piece of paper on which was written, in the German tongue, “The devil plucke out thine eyes and fill their holes with dirt.” Terrified at the unholy nature of her cure, the woman flung the charm away, and her eyes immediately became bleared and watery as before.[110] A woman suspected of witchcraft was taken in hand by a gentleman, who undertook to induce her to confess. She was very stiff about the matter, and denied all dealings with the devil in any way. Suddenly, at some distance from them, appeared a weasel or a lobster, looking straight at them. “Look!” said the gentleman, “yonder same is thy spirit!” “Oh, master,” said she, “that is a vermine. There be many of them everywhere.” But as they went towards it, the weasel or lobster vanished clean out of sight. “Surely,” said the gentleman, “it is thy spirit.” But still she denied, “and with that her mouth was drawn all awrie.” When a little further pressed she allowed all, and the gentleman, being no justice, sent her home, exhorting her to go to a magistrate and ease her soul by confession. As she got home she was met by another witch who came violently enraged against her. “Ah, thou beast! what hast thou done? thou hast bewrayed us all!” she said. “What remedy now?” said she. “What remedy?” saith the other, “send thy spirit and touch him.” At that moment the gentleman felt, as it were, a flash of fire about him; but he lifted his hat and prayed, and the spirit came back and said it could do him no hurt, because he had faith. So then they sent it against his child, and the child was taken ill with great pain and died. The witches confessed and were hanged. Another witch had her spirit hidden in the boll of a tree; and there she held long conversations with this ghastly Ariel, he answering in a hollow ghoustie voice, as might be expected. When any offended her, she would go to the tree and release her imp to do them harm. She had killed many hogs, horses, and the like by this spirit; but at last justice got hold of her with its mailed hand and killed her. Another friend of Giffard’s, also under the disguise of one of his characters, was twice on a jury, when certain old women were charged with harming their neighbours’ goods and lives. There was no proof in either case, and the old women protested their innocence passionately; but the jury brought them in guilty, which was perfectly logical and right according to their notions of the law of that God who suffers the devil to torment the sons of men, and to delude old women into the possession of unholy powers. What, indeed, could be done with them when, by a look or a word, they could afflict even unto death the most beautiful of God’s creatures, and send the devil to inhabit the purest of souls? The mischief lay in the fundamental creed, not so much in the application of it, terrible and bloody as it was; and it is against this creed, that I would most earnestly insist. It must be remembered, too, that Giffard writes ironically, and brings together all these cases as evidence of the foolishness and wickedness of the faith.
THE POSSESSED MAID OF THAMES STREET.[111]
In 1603, Mary Glover, a merchant’s daughter in Thames Street, gave herself out as bewitched, and said that Mother Jackson had done it. A little glimmering of reason made the physician Dr. Boncraft tell the Lord Chief Justice Anderson that Mother Jackson was wrongfully accused, and the girl was counterfeiting. So the Lord Chief Justice caused the Recorder of London, Sir John Crook, have her to him in his chambers in the Temple. The maid went with her mother and some neighbours, and in an hour’s time came Mother Jackson, disguised like a country market woman, with a muffler hiding her face, an old hat, and a short cloak bespattered with mire. As soon as she entered the maid fell backward on the floor; “her Eyes drawn into her Head, her Tongue toward her Throat, her Mouth drawn up to her Ear, her Bodie became stiff and senseless, Her Lips being shut closs a plain and audible Voice came out from her Nostrils saying ‘Hang her, hang her.’” The Recorder, willing to try her, called for a candle at which to light a sheet of paper, then held the burning paper to her hand till a blister came, rising and breaking and the water running down on the floor. But still the maid lay as if dead, with the Voice coming out of her Nostrils, saying, “Hang her, hang her.” Not satisfied with the trial of burning, the Recorder got a long pin, which he made hot and thrust up her nostrils to see if she would “neese,” wink, bend her brows, or stir her head; but still she lay as before, stiff, senseless, and as one dead. The minister, one Lewis Hughes, who tells this story which Sinclair quotes, told the Recorder that he had often prayed with the maid, and that when he concluded with the Lord’s Prayer and came to “but deliver us from all evil,” the maid would be tost and shaken as a mastiff might shake a cur. Then the Recorder bade the witch say the Lord’s Prayer, but she could not say it: she kept on all right until the clause “deliver us from evil,” and this she skipped over; neither would she confess that Jesus Christ was our Lord in the Articles of the Christian Faith. When Mary was in her fits, if the witch but so much as laid her hand upon her she was tost and shaken fearfully. This the Recorder wished to verify: so he bade first one, then another, of the neighbours come forward and touch her; which they did; but she never stirred till Mother Jackson touched her, when she was shaken as before. Then the Recorder said, “Lord, have mercy upon the woman!” for he was now fully convinced; and sent poor old Mother Jackson off to Newgate. As soon as she was sent off the maid came to herself, the voice ceased out of her nostrils, and she went home with her mother. Three weeks or more after the witch was condemned, the maid had the same fits, strange and fearful to behold, and the Recorder told the minister, and all the ministers of London, “that we might be ashamed to see a Child of God in the Claws of the Devil without any hope of deliverance but by such means as God had appointed—Fasting and Prayer.” Then five ministers, all good Christians and sound believers, assembled and prayed from morning to candle-light, when Mary suddenly started out of her chair—they crying “Jesus help, Jesus save!”—and came up to Lewis Hughes, in a state of wildness and dismay. As he stood behind her holding her by the arms, she lifted both herself and him off the ground, foaming at the mouth and struggling thus all over the chamber; and then her strength gave way, and she fell as if dead, her head hanging down and her limbs, which had been so stiff and frozen, now supple and limber. In a short time her eyes came back into their place and her tongue came out of her throat, and she looked round and said cheerfully, “Oh! he is come, he is come! The Comforter is come! the Comforter is come! I am delivered, I am delivered!” Her father hearing these words wept and said, “These were her grandfather’s words when he was at the stake, the fire crackling about him,” for he died a martyr to the Reformed Faith in Queen Mary’s time. Then she prayed and thanked God till her voice was weak, and so the company separated, and Mary went home. Afterwards she was put with Lewis Hughes for a year, lest Satan should assault her again, and Mr. John Swan wrote the most canting and nauseating book on her “case” that ever fanatic penned or the duped and the gulled believed. But poor old Mother Jackson was dead: and those who mourned for her, mourned in secret and silence and shame.
There was another case of possession, this same year—Thomas Harrison, the Boy of Norwich—chiefly remarkable for having procured such attention from the ecclesiastical authorities that seven persons were formally licensed to have private prayers and fasting for his deliverance. But the bishop and commissioners who had seen his fits thought him an impostor, so his case died out for want of public support.[112]
And now we have the master of kingcraft on the throne, with his mania against witches, his private vices, and public follies, treacherous, cruel, narrow-minded, and cowardly beyond anything that has ever disgraced the English throne before or since. And one of the first trials for witchcraft during his reign was that disgraceful affair in which Somerset and his wife, Foreman, Sir Thomas Overbury, and Mrs. Turner were all mixed up together.
SWEET FATHER FOREMAN.
That Carr and Lady Essex should have an intrigue together was not so bad, but that Mrs. Turner should have recourse to charms and conjurations, “to inchant the Viscount’s affection towards her,” that “much time should be spent, many words of witchcraft, great cost in making pictures of wax, crosses of silver, and little babies for that use,” that specially, there should be among the images of wax, one “very sumptuously apparrelled in silke and sattin, as alsoe another sitting in forme of a naked woman spreading and laying forth her haires in a glass,” was terrible misdoing against both God and the king. The murder of Sir Thomas Overbury was venial; the intrigue between his favourite and another man’s wife was venial too; his own vices were mere kindly flea-bites on his dignity; but charms and conjurations, and my Lady Essex calling that old wizard Foreman her “sweet father”—this was more than the British Solomon could well digest. So when he had got tired of Carr and wanted to be rid of him, he suddenly remembered sweet Father Foreman, disciple of Dr. Dee, and Mrs. Turner, inventor of yellow starch for ruffs and falling bands, and not only smote Somerset straight in the face for his own share, but sent a side shaft after him, through his “creatures.” Well for himself was it that sweet Father Foreman was dead and buried deep; so there only remained Mrs. Turner and one or two inferior agents in the matter—just enough to keep the people amused, and satisfy the royal lust for witch blood. Somerset came to the block on another count, about as false as the rest; and Mrs. Turner swung from the gibbet in her yellow ruff on every plea but the right one, and for any sin but those of her real and actual life. After her death was found her black scarf full of white crosses: and the mould in which Father Foreman had cast his leaden images of women; and written charms spread out on fair white parchment; and, worst of all, a list of all the ladies who had gone to consult the sorcerer as to how they might gain the love of other lords than their own; which list the Lord Chief Justice would not read out in court because, said the gossips, his own wife’s name was the first that caught his eye.