With this crowning atrocity, the catalogue of murders in England closes; the penal statutes against witchcraft being repealed in 1736, and the pretended exercise of such arts being punished in future by imprisonment and pillory. Even yet however the case of Rex v. Weldon, in 1809, and the still later case of Barker v. Ray, in Chancery (August 2, 1827), proves that the popular belief in such practices has by no means ceased; and it is not very long ago that a poor woman narrowly escaped with her life from a revival of Hopkins’s trial by water[35]. Barrington, in his observations on the statute 20 Henry VI., does not hesitate to estimate the numbers of those put to death in England on this charge at 30,000!
We now turn to Scotland. Much light has been thrown on the rise and progress, decline and fall, of the delusion in that country by the valuable work of Mr. Pitcairn[36], which contains abstracts of every trial in the supreme Criminal Court of Scotland: the author has given a faithful and minute view of the procedure in each case, accompanied with full extracts from the original documents, where they contained anything of interest.
In no country perhaps did this gloomy superstition assume a darker or bloodier character than in Scotland. Wild, mountainous, and pastoral countries, partly from the striking, varied, and sometimes terrible phenomena which they present,—partly from the habits and manner of life, the tendency to thought and meditation which they create and foster,—have always been the great haunts in which superstition finds its cradle and home. The temper of the Scots, combining reflection with enthusiasm—their mode of life in earlier days, which amidst the occasional bustle of wild and agitating exertion, left many intervals of mental vacuity in solitude—their night watches by the cave on the hill-side—their uncertain climate, of sunshine and vapour and storm—all contributed to exalt and keep alive that superstitions fear with which ignorance looks on every extraordinary movement of nature. From the earliest period of the Scottish annals, “All was bot gaistis, and eldrich phantasie;” the meteors and auroræ boreales which prevailed in this mountainous region were tortured into apparitions of horsemen combating in the air, or corpse-candles burning on the hill-tops[37]. Skeletons danced as familiar guests at the nuptials of our kings[38]: spectres warned them back from the battle-field of Flodden, and visionary heralds proclaimed from the market-cross the long catalogue of the slain.
“Figures that seemed to rise and die,
Gibber and sign, advance and fly,
While nought confirmed, could ear or eye
Discern of sound or mien;
Yet darkly did it seem as there
Heralds and pursuivants appear,
With trumpet sound and blazon fair,
A summons to proclaim.”
Marmion, canto v.
Incubi and succubi wandered about in all directions, with a degree of assurance and plausibility which would have deceived the very elect[39]; and wicked churchmen were cited by audible voices and an accompaniment of thunder before the tribunal of Heaven[40]. The annals of the thirteenth century are dignified with the exploits of three wizards, before whom Nostradamus and Merlin must stoop their crests, Thomas of Ercildoune, Sir Michael Scott, and Lord Soulis. The Tramontane fame of the second had even crossed the Alps, for Dante[41] accommodates him with a place in Hell, between Bonatto, the astrologer of Guido di Monte Feltro, and Asdente of Parma.
But previous to the Reformation, these superstitious notions, though generally prevalent, had hardly assumed a form much calculated to disturb the peace of society. Though in some cases, where these powers had been supposed to have been exercised for treasonable purposes, the punishment of death had been inflicted on the witches[42], men did not as yet think it necessary, merely for the supposed possession of such powers, or their benevolent exercise, to apply the purifying power of fire to eradicate the disorder. Sir Michael and the Rhymer lived and died peaceably; and the tragical fate of the tyrant Soulis on the Nine Stane Rigg was owing, not to the supposed sorceries which had polluted his Castle of Hermitage, but to those more palpable atrocities which had been dictated by the demon of his own evil conscience, and executed by those iron-handed and iron-hearted agents, who were so readily evoked by the simpler spell of feudal despotism.
From the commencement of the Records of the Scottish Justiciary Court, down to the reign of Mary, no trial properly for witchcraft appears on the record. For though in the case of the unfortunate Countess of Glammis, executed in 1536, during the reign of James V., on an accusation of treasonably conspiring the king’s death by poison, some hints of sorcery are thrown into the dittay, probably with the view of exciting a popular prejudice against one whose personal beauty and high spirit rendered her a favourite with the people, it is obvious that nothing was really rested on this charge.
But with the introduction of the Reformation “novus rerum nascitur ordo.” Far from divesting themselves of the dark and bloody superstitions which Innocent’s bull had systematized and propagated, the German reformers had preserved this, while they demolished every other idol, and moving
“In dismal dance around the furnace blue,”
had made even children pass through the fire to Moloch. Their Scottish brethren, adopting implicitly the creed of their continental prototypes, transplanted to our own country, a soil unfortunately but too well prepared for such a seed, the whole doctrine of Satan’s visible agency on earth, with all the grotesque horrors of his commerce with mankind. The aid of the sword of justice was immediately found to be indispensable to the weapons of the spirit; and the verse of Moses which declares that a witch shall not be suffered to live, was forthwith made the groundwork of the Act 73 of the ninth parliament of Queen Mary, which enacted the punishment of death against witches or consulters with witches.