BY HAROLD DIJON.[[3]]
Leonard Scot, in his Discoverie of Witchcraft, gives this definition of a witch: “The sort of such as are said to be witches are women which be commonly old, lame, bleare-eied, pale, fowle, and full of wrinkles; poore, sullen, superstitious, and Papists; or such as know no religion.” Ralph Hoven, an Anglican divine, concedes: “All Papists be not witches, but commonly all witches be the spawn of the Pope.”
The Rev. Josiah Templie, in a sermon preached at Rye in 1619, says: “Because of witchcraft we have divers mischiefs and disorders; and witches they be so long as there be Papists, drabs of the strumpet Pope,” and so on. Oates, in The Witchcrafts of the Roman Jezebel—a folio that brought him a considerable fortune,—repeats the foregoing statements in language not printable.
John Cunliffe of Preston complained in 1596 that witchcraft was made a plea for “burning those of the Old Religion; in moste parte they who be in great povertie.” How many of those burned for witchcraft in England were Catholics, it is not impossible to ascertain. Much material appertaining to the subject waits to be investigated.
The opinion fostered in England that a witch, a devil, and a Catholic were different terms for the same thing, was as sedulously cared for in New England; and we find Cotton Mather, in his Magnalia, and in a sermon preached in Old North Church, Boston, using virtually Scot’s definition of a witch to describe the subject of this sketch.
“Glover,” he says, “was a scandalous old Irishwoman, very poor, a Roman Catholic and obstinate in idolatry.”
A Boston merchant, one Robert Calef, who knew Mrs. Glover, writes of her in More Wonders of the Invisible World, printed in London in 1700. The sympathy he expresses for her was bold for the time, prevented the publication of the work in Boston, brought on him the vituperations of Cotton Mather, and caused the book to be burned in Harvard College yard, by order of Harvard’s president, Dr. Increase Mather.
Calef says: “Goody Glover was a despised, crazy, poor old woman, an Irish Catholic, who was tried for afflicting the Goodwin children. Her behavior at her trial was like that of one distracted. They did her cruel. The proof against her was wholly deficient. The jury brought her guilty. She was hung. She died a Catholic.”
Drake, in his Annals of Witchcraft in New England, makes the following comment on this passage: “Glover was not a crazy person, as we now understand the word; it was not meant that she was insane, but simply that she was weak and infirm.” We have not lost the old meaning of the word; and such expressions as “a crazy table,” “a crazy structure,” are quite common.[[4]]
Ann Glover [commonly called Goody Glover] and her daughter had been living in Boston for some years prior to her execution in 1688. It is not known what part of Ireland she came from. She herself has stated that she and her husband were sold to the Barbadoes in the time of Cromwell. She also related that, shortly after the birth of her daughter, her husband was “scored to death and did not give up his religion, which same I will hold to.”