But what a deluge of blood had been shed before even this principle came to be recognized, and still more before the judicial belief in the existence of the crime was fully eradicated! What a spectacle does Europe present from the date of Innocent’s Bull down to the commencement of the eighteenth century! Sprenger, Henry Institor, Geiss von Lindheim, and others in Germany; Cumanus in Italy; the Inquisition in Spain; Remigius, Bodinus, and De l’Ancre in France and Lorraine, flooring witches on all sides with the ‘Malleus Maleficarum,’ or flogging them to death with the ‘Flagellum’ and ‘Fustis Dæmonum;’ Holland, Geneva, Sweden, Denmark, England, and Scotland vying with each other in the number of trials and the depth of their infatuation and bigotry!
The Reformation, which uprooted other errors, only strengthened and fostered this. Every town and village on the continent was filled with spies, accusers, and wretches who made their living by pretending to detect the secret marks which indicated a compact with the devil[30],—inquisitors, judges, advocates, executioners, every one connected with these frightful tribunals, on the watch for anything which might afford the semblance of suspicion. To ensure the death or ruin of an enemy, nothing more was necessary in most cases than to throw into this lion’s mouth an accusation of magic against him. “Vix aliquis eorum,” says Linden, the determined foe of these proceedings, “qui accusati sunt, supplicium evasit.” The fate of Edelin, of Urban Grandier, and of the Maréchale d’Ancre in France, of Doctor Flaet and Sidonia von Vork in Germany, and of Peter of Abano in Italy[31], prove how often the accusation of sorcery was not even believed by the accusers themselves, but was resorted to merely as a certain means to get rid of an obnoxious enemy. Meanwhile the notaries’ clerks and officials, labouring in their vocation, grew rich from the enormous fees attendant on these trials; the executioner became a personage of first-rate consequence: “generoso equo instar aulici nobilis ferebatur, auro argentoque vestitus: uxor ejus vestium luxu certabat cum nobilioribus[32].” Some partial diminution of this persecuting zeal took place in consequence of a Rescript of John VII. (18th December, 1591), addressed to the commission, by which the fees of court were restricted within more moderate bounds; but still the profits arising from this trade in human victims were sufficient to induce the members and dependants of court, like the Brahmins in India, to support with all their might this system of purification by fire.
At last however the horrors of Wurtzburg and Treves began to open the eyes even of the dullest to the progress of the danger, which, commencing like Elijah’s cloud, had gradually overshadowed the land. While the executions were confined to the lower classes, to crazed old women or unhappy foreigners, even those whose more vigorous intellect enabled them to resist the popular contagion chose rather to sit by spectators of these horrors, than to expose themselves to the fate of Edelin or Flaet, by attacking the madness in which they originated. But now, when the pestilence, spreading on and on, threatened the lives of more exalted victims,—when noblemen and abbots, presidents of courts and professors, began to swell the catalogue, and when no man felt secure that he might not suddenly be compelled by torture to bear witness against his own innocent wife or children,—selfishness began to co-operate with truth and reason. So, in the same way, in the case of the New England witchcrafts, the first effectual check which they received was from the accusation of Mrs. Hale, the clergyman’s wife: her husband, who till then had been most active in the persecution, immediately received a new light with regard to the transaction, and exerted his whole influence for the suppression of the trials.
The first decisive blow which the doctrines of the inquisitors received in Germany was from the publication of the ‘Cautio Criminalis,’ in 1631. In the sixteenth century, it is true that Ponzonibius, Wierus, Pietro d’Apone, and Reginald Scott had published works which went to impugn their whole proceedings; but the works of the foreigners were almost unknown in Germany, and that of Wierus was nearly as absurd and superstitious as the doctrines he combated. It is little to the credit of the Reformers that the first work in which the matter was treated in a philosophical, humane, and common-sense view should have been the production of a Catholic Jesuit, Frederick Spee, the descendant of a noble family in Westphalia. So strongly did this exposure of the horrors of the witch trials operate on the mind of John Philip Schonbrunn, Bishop of Wurtzburg, and finally Archbishop and Elector of Mentz, that his first care on assuming the Electoral dignity was to abolish the process entirely within his dominions—an example which was soon after followed by the Duke of Brunswick and others of the German princes. Shortly after this the darkness begins to break up, and the dawning of better views to appear, though still liable to partial and temporary obscurations,—the evil apparently shifting further north, and re-appearing in Sweden and Denmark in the shape of the trials at Mora and Fioge. Reichard[33] has published a rescript of Frederick William, Elector of Brandenburg, bearing date the 4th of November, 1654, addressed to the judges in reference to the case of Ann of Ellerbroke, enjoining that the prisoner should be allowed to be heard in defence, before any torture was resorted to (a principle directly the reverse of those maintained by the inquisitorial courts), and expressly reprobating the proof by water as an unjust and deceitful test, to which no credit was to be given. Even where a conviction takes place, as in the Neuendorf trial of Catherine Sempels, we find the sentence of death first passed upon her by the provincial judges, commuted into imprisonment for life by the Electoral Chamber in 1671,—a degree of lenity which never could have taken place during the height of the mania.
In 1701 the celebrated inaugural Thesis of Thomasius, ‘De Crimine Magiæ,’ was publicly delivered, with the highest applause, in the University of Halle, a work which some fifty years before would assuredly have procured the author no other crown but that of martyrdom, but which was now received with general approbation, as embodying the views which the honest and intelligent had long entertained. Thomasius’s great storehouse of information and argument was the work of Bekker, who again had modelled his on the Treatise of Van Dale on Oracles; and Thomasius, while he adopted his facts and arguments, steered clear of those Cartesian doctrines which had been the chief cause why the work of Bekker had produced so little practical effect. Still, notwithstanding the good thus produced, the fire of persecution seems to have been smothered only, not extinguished. In 1728 it flamed up again at Szegedin in Hungary, where thirteen persons were burnt alive on three scaffolds, for witchcraft, under circumstances of horror worthy of the wildest periods of this madness. And so late as 1749 comes the frightful story of Maria Renata, of Wurtzburg, the whole official details of which are published by Horst, and which in its atrocity was worthy to conclude the long series of murders which had polluted the annals of Bamberg. This trial is remarkable from the feeling of disgust it seems to have excited in Germany, Italy, and France; and the more so because, whatever may be thought of the reality of her pretensions, there seems to be no doubt from the evidence that Maria was by no means immaculate, but was a dabbler in spells and potions, a venefica in the sense of the Theodosian code. But there is a time, as Solomon says, for everything under the sun; and the glories of the ‘Malleus Maleficarum’ were departed. The consequence was, that taking this trial as their text-book, various foreigners, particularly Maffei, Tartarotti, and Dell’ Ossa, attacked the system so vigorously, that since that time the adherents of the old superstition seem to have abandoned the field in Germany.
Matters had come to a close much sooner in Switzerland and France. In the Catholic canton of Glarus, it is said, a witch was burnt even so late as 1786; but in the Protestant cantons no trials seem to have taken place for two centuries past. The last execution in Geneva was that of Michel Chauderon, in 1652. Sebastian Michaelis indeed would have us to believe, that at one time the tribunal at Geneva put no criminals accused of witchcraft to death, unless on proof of their having done actual injury to men or animals, and that the other phenomena of confessions, etc., were regarded as mere mental delusions. If such however was originally the case, this humane rule was unfortunately soon abandoned; for nowhere did the mania of persecution at one time rage more than in Geneva, as is evident from Delrio’s preface. It seems fairly entitled however to the credit of having been the first state in Europe which emancipated itself from the influence of this bloody superstition.
In France, the edict of Louis XIV., in 1682, directed only against pretended witches and prophets, proves distinctly that the belief in the reality of witchcraft had ceased, and that it was merely the pretended exercise of such powers which it was thought necessary to suppress. It is highly to the credit of Louis and his ministry, that this step was taken by him in opposition to a formal requête by the Parliament of Normandy, presented in the year 1670, on the occasion of his Majesty having commuted the punishment of death into banishment for life, in the case of a set of criminals whom the Parliament had condemned more majorum for witchcraft[34]. In this apology for their belief, they reminded Louis of the inveterate practice of the kingdom; of the numerous arrêts of the Parliament of Paris, from the trials in Artois in 1459, reported by Monstrelet, down to that of Leger in May 1616; of the judgments pronounced under the commission addressed by Henry the Great to the Sieur de l’Ancre, in 1609; of those pronounced by the Parliament of Toulouse, in 1577; of the celebrated case of Gaufridy, in 1611; of the arrêts of the Parliaments of Dijon and Rennes, following on the remarkable trial of the Maréchal de Retz, in 1441, who was burnt for magic and sorcery in the presence of the Duke of Bretagne: and after combating the authority of a canon of the Council of Aucyra, and of a passage in St. Augustine, which had been quoted against them by their opponents, they sum up their pleading with the following placid and charitable supplication to his Majesty—“Qu’elle voudra bien souffrir l’exécution des arrêts qu’ils ont rendus, et leur permettre de continuer l’instruction et jugement des procès des personnes accusés de sortilège, et que la piété de Votre Majesté ne souffrira pas que l’on introduise durant son règne une nouvelle opinion contraire aux principes de la religion, pour laquelle Votre Majesté a toujours si glorieusement employé ses soins et ses armes.” Notwithstanding this concluding compliment to his Majesty’s zeal and piety, it is doubtful whether the Parliament of Normandy, in their anxiety for the support of their constitutional privileges, could have taken a more effectual plan to ruin their own case, than by thus presenting Louis with a sort of anthology or elegant extracts from the atrocities of the witch trials; and in all probability the appearance of the edict of 1680 was accelerated by the very remonstrance by which the Norman sages had hoped to strangle it.
In turning from the Continent to the state of matters in England and Scotland, the prospect is anything but a comfortable one; and certainly nothing can be more deceitful than the unction which Dr. Francis Hutchinson lays to his soul, when he ventures to assert that England was one of those countries where its horrors were least felt and earliest suppressed. Witness the trials and convictions which, even before the enactment of any penal statute, took place for this imaginary offence, as in the case of Bolingbroke and Margery Jourdain, whose incantations the genius of Shakespear has rendered familiar to us in the Second Part of King Henry VI. Witness the successive statutes of Henry VIII., of Elizabeth, and of James I., the last of which was repealed only in 1736, and passed while Coke was Attorney-General, and Bacon a member of the Commons! Witness the exploits of Hopkins, the witch-finder-general, against the wretched creatures in Lincolnshire, of whom—
“Some only for not being drown’d,
And some for sitting above ground
Whole nights and days upon their breeches,
And feeling pain, were hanged for witches.”
Hudibras, part ii. canto iii.
What would the Doctor have said to the list of THREE THOUSAND victims executed during the dynasty of the Long Parliament alone, which Zachary Grey, the editor of Hudibras, says he himself perused? What absurdities can exceed those sworn to in the trials of the witches of Warboys, whose fate was, in Dr. Hutchinson’s days, and perhaps is still, annually “improved” in a commemoration sermon at Cambridge? or in the case of the luckless Lancashire witches, sacrificed, as afterwards appeared, to the villany of the impostor Robinson, whose story furnished materials to the dramatic muse of Heywood and Shadwell? How melancholy is the spectacle of a man like Hale, condemning Amy Duny and Rose Cullender, in 1664, on evidence which, though corroborated by the opinion of Sir Thomas Browne, a child would now be disposed to laugh at? A better order of things, it is true, commences with the Chief-justiceship of Holt. The evidence against Mother Munnings, in 1694, would, with a man of weaker intellect, have sealed the fate of the unfortunate old woman; but Holt charged the jury with such firmness and good sense, that a verdict of Not Guilty, almost the first then on record in a trial for witchcraft, was found. In about ten other trials before Holt, from 1694 to 1701, the result was the same. Wenham’s case, which followed in 1711, sufficiently evinced the change which had taken place in the feelings of judges. Throughout the whole trial, Chief Justice Powell seems to have sneered openly at the absurdities which the witnesses, and in particular the clergymen who were examined, were endeavouring to press upon the jury; but, with all his exertions, a verdict of guilty was found against the prisoner. With the view however of securing her pardon, by showing how far the prejudices of the jury had gone, he asked, when the verdict was given in, “whether they found her guilty upon the indictment for conversing with the devil in the shape of a cat?” The foreman answered, “We find her guilty of that!” It is almost needless to add that a pardon was procured for her. And yet after all this, in 1716, Mrs. Hicks and her daughter, aged nine, were hanged at Huntingdon for selling their souls to the devil, and raising a storm, by pulling off their stockings and making a lather of soap!