Chapter 3 No.3

'Cardan believed great states depend

Upon the tip o' th' Bear's tail's end,'

correctly enough expresses both the persuasion of the public and that of many of the soi-disant philosophers of the intimate dependence of the fates of both states and individuals of this globe upon other globes in the universe.

113 It was not so much a want of sufficient observation of known facts, as the want of a true method and of verification, which rendered the investigations of the earlier philosophers so vague and uncertain. And the same causes which necessarily prevented Aristotle, the greatest intellect perhaps that has ever illuminated the world, from attaining to the greater perfection of the modern philosophy, are applicable, in a greater degree, to the case of the medi?val and later discoverers. The causes of the failure of the pre-scientific world are well stated by a living writer. 'Men cannot, or at least they will not, await the tardy results of discovery; they will not sit down in avowed ignorance. Imagination supplies the deficiencies of observation. A theoretic arch is thrown across the chasm, because men are unwilling to wait till a solid bridge be constructed.... The early thinkers, by reason of the very splendour of their capacities, were not less incompetent to follow the slow processes of scientific investigation, than a tribe of martial savages to adopt the strategy and discipline of modern armies. No accumulated laws, no well-tried methods existed for their aid. The elementary laws in each department were mostly undetected.' The guide of knowledge is verification. 'The complexity of phenomena is that of a labyrinth, the paths of which cross and recross each other; one wrong turn causes the wanderer infinite perplexity. Verification is the Ariadne-thread by which the real issues may be found. Unhappily, the process of verification is slow, tedious, often difficult and deceptive; and we are by nature lazy and impatient, hating labour, eager to obtain. Hence credulity. We accept facts without scrutiny, inductions without proof; and we yield to our disposition to believe that the order of phenomena must correspond with our conceptions.' A profound truth is contained in the assertion of Comte (Cours de Philosophie Positive) that 'men have still more need of method than of doctrine, of education than of instruction.'-Aristotle, by G. H. Lewes.

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CHAPTER V.

Sorcery in Southern Europe-Cause of the Retention of the Demonological Creed among the Protestant Sects-Calvinists the most Fanatical of the Reformed Churches-Witch-Creed sanctioned in the Authorised Version of the Sacred Scriptures-The Witch-Act of 1604-James VI.'s 'Demonologie'-Lycanthropy and Executions in France-The French Provincial Parliaments active in passing Laws against the various Witch-practices-Witchcraft in the Pyrenees-Commission of Inquiry appointed-Its Results-Demonology in Spain.

In the annals of black magic, the silent tribunals of the Inquisition in Southern Europe which has consigned so many thousands of heretics to the torture room and to the flames, do not reveal so many trials for the simple crime of witchcraft as the tribunals of the more northern peoples: there all dissent from Catholic and priestly dogma was believed to be inspired by the powers of hell, deserving a common punishment, whether in the form of denial of transubstantiation, infallibility, of skill in magic, or of the vulgar practice of sorcery. Throughout Europe penalties and prosecutions were being continually enacted. The popes in Italy fulminated abroad their decrees, and the parliaments of France were almost daily engaged in pronouncing sentence.

Where the papal yoke had been thrown off in Northern Germany, in Scotland, and in England, the belief and the persecution remained in full force, indeed greatly increased; and it is obvious to inquire the cause of the retention, with many additions, of the doctrine of witchcraft by those who had at last finally rejected with scorn most of the grosser religious dogmas of the old Church, who were so loud in their just denunciation of Catholic tyranny and superstition. A general answer might be given that the Reformation of the sixteenth century, while it swept away in those countries in which it was effected the most injurious principles of ecclesiasticism, the principles of infallibility and authority in matters of faith, for the destruction of which gratitude is due to the independent minds of Luther, Zuinglius, and others, was yet far from complete in its negations. The leaders of that great revolution, with all their genius and boldness, could only partially free themselves from the prejudices of education and of the age. To develope the important principles they established, the rights of private judgment and religious freedom, was the legacy and duty of their successors; a duty which they failed to perform, to the incalculable misfortune of succeeding generations. The Sacred Scriptures, the common and only authority on faith among the different sections of Protestantism, unfortunately seemed to inculcate the dread power of the devil and his malicious purposes, and both the Jewish and Christian Scriptures apparently taught the reality of witchcraft. Theologians of all parties would have as easily dared to question the existence of God himself as to doubt the actual power of that other deity, and the unbelievers in his universal interference were not illogically stigmatised as atheists. With the Protestants some adventitious circumstances might make a particular church more fanatical and furious than another, and the Calvinists have deserved the palm for the bitterest persecution of witchcraft. But neither the Lutheran nor the Anglican section is exempt from the odious imputation.114

114 Lord Peter, and his humbler brothers Martin and Jack, in different degrees, are all of them obnoxious to the accusation; and Bossuet (Variations des Eglises Protestantes, xi. 201), who is assured that St. Paul predicted the 'doctrines of devils' to be characteristic of Manich?an and Albigensian heresy, might have more safely interpreted the prophecy as applicable to the universal Christian Church (at least of Western Europe) of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The followers of Calvin were most deeply imbued with hatred and horror of Catholic practices, and, adopting the old prejudice or policy of their antagonists, they were willing to confound the superstitious rites of Catholicism with those of demonolatry. The Anglican Church party, whose principles were not so entirely opposite to the old religion, had far less antipathy: until the revolution of 1688 it was for the most part engaged in contending against liberty rather than against despotism of conscience; against Calvinism than against Catholicism. Yet the Church of England is exposed to the reproach of having sanctioned the common opinions in the most authoritative manner. In the authorised version of the Sacred Scriptures, in the translation of which into the English language forty-seven selected divines, eminent for position and learning, could concur in consecrating a vulgar superstition, the most imposing sanction was given. Had they possessed either common sense or courage, these Anglican divines might have expressed their disbelief or doubt of its truth by a more rational, and possibly more proper, interpretation of the Hebrew and Greek expressions; or if that was not possible, by an accompanying unequivocal protest. But the subservience as well as superstition of the English Church under the last of the Tudors and under the Stuarts is equally a matter of fact and of reprobation.

It was in the first year of the first King of Great Britain that the English Parliament passed the Act which remained in force, or at least on the Statute Book, until towards the middle of last century.115 After due consideration the bill passed both Houses; and by it, it was enacted that 'If any person shall use any invocation or conjuration of any evil or wicked spirit, or shall consult, covenant with, entertain, employ, feed, or reward any evil or cursed spirit to or for any intent or purpose, or take up any dead man, woman, or child out of the grave-or the skin, bone, or any part of the dead person, to be employed or used in any manner of witchcraft, sorcery, charm, or enchantment; or shall use, exercise, or practice any sort of witchcraft, &c., whereby any person shall be destroyed, killed, wasted, consumed, pined or lamed in any part of the body; that every such person being convicted shall suffer death.' Twelve bishops sat in the Committee of the Upper House.116

115 The 'Witch Act' of James I. was passed in the year 1604. The new translation, or the present authorised version, of the Bible, was executed in 1607. The inference seems plain. An ecclesiastical canon passed at the same period, which prohibits the inferior clergy from exorcising without episcopal licence, proves at the same time the prevalence of 'possession' and the prevalence of exorcism in the beginning of the seventeenth century.

116 The parliament of James I. would have done wisely to have embraced the philosophic sentiment of a Hungarian prince (1095-1114) who is said to have dismissed the absurd superstition with laconic brevity: 'De strigis vero, qu? non sunt, nulla qu?stio fiat.'

The Scottish Parliament, during Queen Mary's reign, anathematised the papistical practices; and from that time the annals of Scottish judicature are filled with records of trials and convictions. James was educated among the stern adherents of Calvin. In whatever matters of ecclesiastical faith and rule the countryman of Knox may have deviated from the teaching of his preceptors, he maintained with constant zeal his faith in the devil's omnipotence; and we may be disposed to concede the title of 'Defender of the Faith' (so confidently prefixed to successive editions of the Authorised Version) to his activity in the extermination of witches, rather than to his hatred of priestcraft. While monarch only of the Northern kingdom, he published a denunciation of the damnable infidelity of the 'Witch Advocates,' and his own unhesitating belief. James VI. and his clerical advisers were persuaded, or affected to be persuaded, that the devil, with all his hellish crew, was conspiring to frustrate the beneficial intentions of a pious Protestant prince. Infernal despair and rage reached the climax when the marriage with the Danish princess was to be effected. But, far from being terrified by so formidable a conspiracy, he gloried in the persuasion that he was the devil's greatest enemy; and the man who shuddered at the sight of a drawn sword was not afraid to enter the lists against the invisible spiritual enemy.

The 'Demonologie' was published at Edinburgh in 1597. The author introduces his book with these words: 'The fearful abounding at this time in this country of these detestable slaves of the devil, the witches or enchanters, hath moved me (beloved reader) to despatch in post this following treatise of mine, not in any wise (as I protest) to serve for a show of my learning and ingine, but only moved of conscience to press thereby so far as I can to resolve the doubting hearts of many; both that such assaults of Sathan are most certainly practised, and that the instruments thereof merits most severely to be punished: against the damnable opinions of two principally in our age, whereof the one called Scot, an Englishman, is not ashamed in public print to deny that there can be such a thing as witchcraft, and so maintains the old error of the Sadducees in denying of spirits. The other, called Wierus, a German physician, sets out a public apology for all these crafts-folks, whereby procuring for their impunity, he plainly bewrays himself to have been one of that profession. And for to make this treatise the more pleasant and facile, I have put it in form of a dialogue, which I have divided into three books: the first speaking of magic in general, and necromancy in special; the second, of sorcery and witchcraft; and the third contains a discourse of all those kinds of spirits and spectres that appears and troubles persons, together with a conclusion of the whole work. My intention in this labour is only to prove two things, as I have already said: the one, that such devilish arts have been and are; the other, what exact trial and severe punishment they merit; and therefore reason I what kind of things are possible to be performed in these arts, and by what natural causes they may be. Not that I touch every particular thing of the devil's power, for that were infinite; but only, to speak scholasticly (since this cannot be spoken in our language), I reason upon genus, leaving species and differentia to be comprehended therein.'117

117 Speculating on the manner of witches' aerial travels, he thinks, 'Another way is somewhat more strange, and yet it is possible to be true: which is, by being carried by the force of their spirit, which is their conductor, either above the earth or above the sea swiftly to the place where they are to meet: which I am persuaded to be likewise possible, in respect that as Habakkuk was carried by the angel in that form to the den where Daniel lay, so think I the devil will be ready to imitate God as well in that as in other things, which is much more possible to him to do, being a spirit, than to a mighty wind, being but a natural meteor to transport from one place to another a solid body, as is commonly and daily seen in practice. But in this violent form they cannot be carried but a short bounds, agreeing with the space that they may retain their breath; for if it were longer their breath could not remain unextinguished, their body being carried in such a violent and forcible manner.... And in this transporting they say themselves that they are invisible to any other, except amongst themselves. For if the devil may form what kind of impressions he pleases in the air, as I have said before, speaking of magic, why may he not far easier thicken and obscure so the air that is next about them, by contracting it straight together that the beams of any other man's eyes cannot pierce through the same to see them?' &c.-Cyclop?dia of English Literature, edited by Robert Chambers.

The following injunction is characteristic of all persecuting maxims, and is worthy of the disciple of Bodin: 'Witches ought to be put to death according to the law of God, the civil and the imperial law, and the municipal law of all Christian nations. Yea, to spare the life and not to strike whom God bids strike, and so severely in so odious a treason against God, is not only unlawful but doubtless as great a sin in the magistrate as was Saul's sparing Agag.' It is insisted upon by this sagacious author (echoing the rules laid down in the 'Malleus'), that any and every evidence is good against an exceptional crime: that the testimony of the youngest children, and of persons of the most infamous character, not only may, but ought to be, received.

This mischievous production is a curious collection of demonological learning and experience, exhibiting the reputed practices and ceremonies of witches, the mode of detecting them, &c.; but is useless even for the purpose of showing the popular Scottish or English notions, being chiefly a medley of classical or foreign ideas, inserted apparently (spite of the royal author's assurance to the contrary) to parade an array of abstruse and pedantic learning. That some of the excessive terror said to have been exhibited was simulated to promote his pretensions to the especial hostility of Satan, is probable: but that also he was impressed, in some degree, with a real and lively fear scarcely admits of doubt. The modern Solomon might well have blushed at the superior common sense of a barbaric chief; and the 'judges of the seventeenth century might have been instructed and confounded at the superior wisdom of Rotharis [a Lombardic prince], who derides the absurd superstition and protects the wretched victims of popular or judicial cruelty.'118

118 Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, xlv. It would have been well for his subjects if he could have congratulated himself, like Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (the model of philosophic princes, and a more practically virtuous, if not wiser, philosopher than the proverbial Solomon, and of whom Niebuhr, History of Rome, v., asserts, 'If there is any sublime human virtue, it is his'), that he had learnt from his instructors to laugh at the bugbears of witches and demons.-Τ? ε?? ?αυτ?ν.-The Meditations of M. A. Antoninus.

Previously to the 'Witch Act,' the charge of sorcery was, in most cases, a subordinate and subsidiary one, attached to various political or other indictments. Henceforward the practice of the peculiar offence might be entirely independent of any more substantial accusation. In England, compared with the other countries of Europe, folly more than ferocity, perhaps, generally characterises the proceedings of the tribunals. During the pre-Reformation ages, France, even more than her island neighbour, suffered from the crime. The fates of the Templars, of Jeanne d'Arc, of Arras, of those suspected of causing the mad king's, Charles VI., derangement (when many of the white witches, or wizards, 'mischievously good,' suffered for failing, by a pretended skill, to effect his promised cure) are some of the more conspicuous examples. But in France, as in the rest of Europe, it was in the post-feudal period that prosecutions became of almost daily occurrence.

A prevalent kind of sorcery was that of lycanthropy, as it was called, a prejudice derived, it seems, in part from the Pythagorean metempsychosis. A few cases will illustrate the nature of this stupendous transformation. That it is mostly found to take place in France and in the southern districts, the country of wolves, that still make their ravages there, is a fact easily intelligible; and if the devil can enter into swine, he can also, in the opinion of the demonologists, as easily enter into wolves. At D?le, in 1573, a loup-garou, or wehr-wolf (man-wolf), was accused of devastating the country and devouring little children. The indictment was read by Henri Camus, doctor of laws and counsellor of the king, to the effect that the accused, Gilles Garnier, had killed a girl twelve years of age, having torn her to pieces, partly with his teeth, and partly with his wolf's paws; that having dragged the body into the forest, he there devoured the larger portion, reserving the remainder for his wife; also that, by reason of injuries inflicted in a similar way on another young girl, the loup-garou had occasioned her death; also that he had devoured a boy of thirteen, tearing him limb by limb; that he displayed the same unnatural propensities even in his own proper shape. Fifty persons were found to bear witness; and he was put to the rack, which elicited an unreserved confession. He was then brought back into court, when Dr. Camus, in the name of the Parliament of D?le, pronounced the following sentence: 'Seeing that Gilles Garnier has, by the testimony of credible witnesses and by his own spontaneous confession, been proved guilty of the abominable crimes of lycanthropy and witchcraft, this court condemns him, the said Grilles, to be this day taken in a cart from this spot to the place of execution, accompanied by the executioner, where he, by the said executioner, shall be tied to a stake and burned alive, and that his ashes be then scattered to the winds. The court further condemns him, the said Gilles, to the costs of this prosecution. Given at D?le this 18th day of January, 1573.' Five years later a man named Jacques Rollet was burned alive in the Place de Grêve for the same crime, having been tried and condemned by the Parliament of Paris.119

119 A still more sensational case happened at a village in the mountains of Auvergne. A gentleman while hunting was suddenly attacked by a savage wolf of monstrous size. Impenetrable by his shot, the beast made a spring upon the helpless huntsman, who in the struggle luckily, or unluckily for the unfortunate lady, contrived to cut off one of its fore-paws. This trophy he placed in his pocket, and made the best of his way homewards in safety. On the road he met a friend to whom he exhibited a bleeding paw, or rather a woman's hand (so it was produced from the hunter's pocket) upon which was a wedding ring. His wife's ring was at once recognised by the other. His suspicions aroused, he immediately went in search of his wife, who was found sitting by the fire in the kitchen, her arm hidden beneath her apron: when the husband seizing her by the arm found his terrible suspicions verified. The bleeding stump was there, evidently just fresh from the wound. She was given into custody, and in the event was burned at Riom in presence of thousands of spectators. Among some of the races of India, among the Khonds of the mountains of Orissa, a superstition obtains like that of the loup-garou of France. In India the tiger takes the place of the wolf, and the metamorphosed witch is there known as the Pulta-bag.

A kindred prejudice, Vampirism, has still many adherents in Eastern Europe. The vampire is a human being who in his tomb maintains a posthumous existence by ascending in the night and sucking the bodies of the living. His punishment was necessarily less tremendous than that of the witch: the dead body only being burned to ashes. An official document, quoted by Horst, narrates the particulars of the examination and burning of a disinterred vampire.

Several witches were burned in successive years throughout the kingdom. In 1564, three witches and a wizard were executed at Poictiers: on the rack they declared that they had destroyed numbers of sheep by magical preparations, attended the Sabbaths, &c. Trois Echelles, a celebrated sorcerer, examined in the presence of Charles IX. and his court, acknowledged his obligation to the devil, to whom he had sold himself, recounting the debaucheries of the Sabbath, the methods of bewitching, and the compositions of the unguents for blighting cattle. The astounding fact was also revealed that some twelve hundred accomplices were at large in different parts of the land. The provincial parliaments in the end of this and the greater part of the next century are unremittingly engaged in passing decrees and making provisions against the increasing offences.120 'The Parliament of Rouen decreed that the possession of a grimoire or book of spells was sufficient evidence of witchcraft; and that all persons on whom such books were found should be burned alive. Three councils were held in different parts of France in 1583, all in relation to the same subject. The Parliament of Bordeaux issued strict injunctions to all curates and clergy whatever to use redoubled efforts to root out the crime of witchcraft. The Parliament of Tours was equally peremptory, and feared the judgments of an offended God if all these dealers with the devil were not swept from the face of the land. The Parliament of Rheims was particularly severe against the noueurs d'aiguillettes or 'tiers of the knot'-people of both sexes who took pleasure in preventing the consummation of marriage that they might counteract the command of God to our first parents to increase and multiply. This parliament held it to be sinful to wear amulets to preserve from witchcraft; and that this practice might not be continued within its jurisdiction, drew up a form of exorcism 'which could more effectually defeat the agents of the devil and put them to flight.'121

120 Montaigne, one of the few Frenchmen at this time who seemed to discredit the universal creed, in one of his essays ventures to think 'it is very probable that the principal credit of visions, of enchantments, and of such extraordinary effects, proceeds from the power of the imagination acting principally upon the more impressible minds of the vulgar.' He is inclined to assign the prevalent 'liaisons' (nouements d'aiguillettes) to the apprehensions of a fear with which in his age the French world was so perplexed (si entravé). Essais, liv. i. 20.

121 Extraordinary Popular Delusions, by Mackay, whose authorities are Tablier, Boguet (Discours sur les Sorciers), and M. Jules Garinet (Histoire de la Magie).

In France, and still more in Italy, there is reason for believing that many of the convicts were not without the real guilt of toxicological practices; and they might sometimes properly deserve the opprobrium of the old venefici. The formal trial and sentence to death of La Maréchale de l'Ancre in 1617 was perhaps more political than superstitious, but witchcraft was introduced as one of the gravest accusations. Her preponderance in the councils of Marie de Medici and of Louis XIII. originated in the natural fascination of royal but inferior minds. Two years afterwards occurred a bona fide prosecution on a large scale. A commission was appointed by the Parliament of Bordeaux to inquire into the causes and circumstances of the prevalence of witchcraft in the Pyrenean districts. Espaignol, president of the local parliament, with the better known councillor, Pierre de l'Ancre, who has left a record ('Tableau de l'Inconstance des Mauvais Anges et Démons, où il est amplement traité des Sorciers et Démons: Paris'), was placed at the head of the commission. How the district of Labourt was so infested with the tribe, that of thirty thousand inhabitants hardly a family existed but was infected with sorcery, is explained by the barren, sterile, mountainous aspect of the neighbourhood of that part of the Pyrenees: the men were engaged in the business of fishermen, and the women left alone were exposed to the tempter. The priests too were as ignorant and wicked as the people; their relations with the lonely wives and daughters being more intimate than proper. Young and handsome women, some mere girls, form the greater proportion of the accused. As many as forty a day appeared at the bar of the commissioners, and at least two hundred were hanged or burned.

Evidence of the appearance of the devil was various and contradictory. Some at the Domdaniel, the place of assemblage, had a vision of a hideous wild he-goat upon a large gilded throne; others of a man twisted and disfigured by Tartarean torture; of a gentleman in black with a sword, booted and spurred; to others he seemed as some shapeless indistinct object, as that of the trunk of a tree, or some huge rock or stone. They proceeded to their meetings riding on spits, pitchforks, broom-sticks: being entertained on their arrival in the approved style, and indulging in the usual licence. Deputies from witchdom attended from all parts, even from Scotland. When reproached by some of his slaves for failing to come to the rescue in the torture-chamber or at the stake, their lord replied by causing illusory fires to be lit, bidding the doubters walk through the harmless flames, promising not more inconvenience in the bonfires of their persecutors. Lycanthropic criminals were also brought up who had prowled about and devastated the sheepfolds. Espaignol and De l'Ancre were provided with two professional Matthew Hopkinses: one a surgeon for examining the 'marks' (generally here discovered in the left eye, like a frog's foot) in the men and older women; the other a girl of seventeen, for the younger of her sex. Many of the priests were executed; several made their escape from the country. Besides the work before mentioned, De l'Ancre published a treatise under the title of 'L'Incrédulité et Mescréance du Sortilége pleinement convaincue,' 1622. The expiration of the term of the Bordeaux commission brought the proceedings to a close, and fortunately saved a number of the condemned.

In Spain, the land of Torquemada and Ximenes, which had long ago fanatically expelled the Jews and recently its old Moorish conquerors from its soil, the unceasing activity of the Inquisition during 140 years must have extorted innumerable confessions and proofs of diabolic conspiracies and heresy. Antonio Llorente, the historian of the Inquisition, to whose rare opportunities of obtaining information we are indebted for some instructive revelations, has exposed a large number of the previously silent and dark transactions of the Holy Office. But the demonological ideas of the Southern Church and people are profusely displayed in the copious dramatic literature of the Spaniards, whose theatre was at one time nearly as popular, if not as influential, as the Church.

The dramas of the celebrated Lope de Vega and of Calderon in particular, are filled with demons as well as angels122-a sort of religious compensation to the Church for the moral deficiencies of a licentious stage, or rather licentious public.

122 In the Nacimiento de Christo of Lope de Vega the devil appears in his popular figure of the dragon. Calderon's Wonder-Working Magician, relating the adventures of St. Cyprian and the various temptations and seductions of the Evil Spirit, like Goethe's Faust, introduces the devil in the disguise of a fashionable and gallant gentleman.-Ticknor's History of Spanish Literature.

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CHAPTER VI.

'Possession' in France in the Seventeenth Century-Urbain Grandier and the Convent of Loudun-Exorcism at Aix-Ecstatic Phenomena-Madeleine Bavent-Her cruel Persecution-Catholic and Protestant Witchcraft in Germany-Luther's Demonological Fears and Experiences-Originated in his exceptional Position and in the extraordinary Circumstances of his Life and Times-Witch-burning at Bamburg and at Würzburg.

Demoniacal possession was a phase of witchcraft which obtained extensively in France during the seventeenth century: the victims of this hallucination were chiefly the female inmates of religious houses, whose inflamed imaginations were prostituted by their priestly advisers to the most atrocious purposes. Urbain Grandier's fate was connected with that of an entire convent. The facts of this celebrated sorcerer's history are instructive. He was educated in a college of the Jesuits at Bordeaux, and presented by the fathers, with whom his abilities and address had gained much applause, to a benefice in Loudun. He provoked by his haughtiness the jealousy of his brother clergy, who regarded him as an intruder, and his pride and resentment increased in direct proportion to the activity of his enemies, who had conspired to effect his ruin. Mounier and Mignon, two priests whom he had mortally offended, were most active. Urbain Grandier was rash enough to oppose himself alone to the united counsels of unscrupulous and determined foes. Defeated singly in previous attempts to drive him from Loudun, the two priests combined with the leading authorities of the place. Their haughty and careless adversary had the advantage or disadvantage of a fine person and handsome face, which, with his other recommendations, gained him universal popularity with the women; and his success and familiarities with the fair sex were not likely to escape the vigilance of spies anxious to collect damaging proofs. What inflamed to the utmost the animosities of the two parties was the success of Canon Mignon in obtaining the coveted position of confessor to the convent of Ursulines in Loudun, to the exclusion of Grandier, himself an applicant. This convent was destined to assume a prominent part in the fate of the curé of the town. The younger nuns, it seems, to enliven the dull monotony of monastic life, adopted a plan of amusing their leisure by frightening the older ones in making the most of their knowledge of secret passages in the building, playing off ghost-tricks, and raising unearthly noises. When the newly appointed confessor was informed of the state of matters he at once perceived the possibility, and formed the design, of turning it to account. The offending nuns were promised forgiveness if they would continue their ghostly amusement, and also affect demoniacal possession; a fraud in which they were more readily induced to participate by an assurance that it might be the humble means of converting the heretics-Protestants being unusually numerous in that part of the country.

As soon as they were sufficiently prepared to assume their parts, the magistrates were summoned to witness the phenomena of possession and exorcism. On the first occasion the Superior of the convent was the selected patient; and it was extracted from the demon in possession that he had been sent by Urbain Grandier, priest of the church of St. Peter. This was well so far; but the civil authorities generally, as it appears, were not disposed to accept even the irrefragable testimony of a demoniac; and the ecclesiastics, with the leading inhabitants, were in conflict with the civil power. Opportunely, however, for the plan of the conspirators, who were almost in despair, an all-powerful ally was enlisted on their side. A severe satire upon some acts of the minister of France, Cardinal Richelieu, or of some of his subordinates, had made its appearance. Urbain was suspected to be the author; his enemies were careful to improve the occasion; and the Cardinal-minister's cooperation was secured. A royal commission was ordered to inquire into the now notorious circumstances of the Loudun diabolism. Laubardemont, the head of the commission, arrived in December 1633, and no time was lost in bringing the matter to a crisis. The house of the suspected was searched for books of magic; he himself being thrown into a dungeon, where the surgeons examined him for the 'marks.' Five insensible spots were found-a certain proof. Meanwhile the nuns become more hysterical than ever; strong suspicion not being wanting that the priestly confessors to the convent availed themselves of their situation to abuse the bodies as well as the minds of the reputed demoniacs. To such an extent went the audacity of the exorcists, and the credulity of the people, that the enceinte condition of one of the sisters, which at the end of five or six months disappeared, was explained by the malicious slander of the devil, who had caused that scandalous illusion. Crowds of persons of all ranks flocked from Paris and from the most distant parts to see and hear the wild ravings of these hysterical or drugged women, whose excitement was such that they spared not their own reputations; and some scandalous exposures were submitted to the amusement or curiosity of the surrounding spectators. Some few of them, aroused from the horrible delusion, or ashamed of their complicity, admitted that all their previous revelations were simple fiction. Means were found to effectually silence such dangerous announcements. The accusers pressed on the prosecution; the influence of his friends was overborne, and Grandier was finally sentenced to the stake. Fearing the result of a despair which might convincingly betray the facts of the case to the assembled multitude, they seem to have prevailed upon the condemned to keep silence up to the last moment, under promise of an easier death. But already fastened to the stake, he learned too late the treachery of his executioners; instead of being first strangled, he was committed alive to the flames. Nor were any 'last confessions' possible. The unfortunate victim of the malice of exasperated rivals, and of the animosity of the implacable Richelieu, has been variously represented.123 It is noticeable that the scene of this affair was in the heart of the conquered Protestant region-Rochelle had fallen only six years before the execution; and the heretics, although politically subdued, were numerous and active. A fact which may account for the seeming indifference and even the opposition of a large number of the people in this case of diabolism which obtained comparatively little credit. It had been urged to the nuns that it would be for the good and glory of Catholicism that the heretics should be confounded by a few astounding miracles. Whether Grandier had any decided heretical inclinations is doubtful; but he wrote against the celibacy of the priesthood, and was suspected of liberal opinions in religion. A Capuchin named Tranquille (a contemporary) has furnished the materials for the 'History of the Devils of Loudun' by the Protestant Aubin, 1716.

123 Michelet apparently accepts the charge of immorality; according to which the curé took advantage of his popularity among the ladies of Loudun, by his insinuating manners, to seduce the wives and daughters of the citizens. By another writer (Alexandre Dumas, Celebrated Crimes) he is supposed to have been of a proud and vindictive disposition, but innocent of the alleged irregularities.

Twenty-four years previously a still more scandalous affair-that of Louis Gauffridi and the Convent of Aix, in which Gauffridi, who had debauched several girls both in and out of the establishment, was the principal actor-was transacted with similar circumstances. Madeleine, one of the novices, soon after entering upon her noviciate, was seized with the ecstatic trances, which were speedily communicated to her companions.124 These fits, in the judgment of the priests, were nothing but the effect of witchcraft. Exorcists elicited from the girls that Louis Gauffridi, a powerful magician having authority over demons throughout Europe, had bewitched them. The questions and answers were taken down, by order of the judges, by reporters, who, while the priests were exorcising, committed the results to writing, published afterwards by one of them, Michaelis, in 1613. Among the interesting facts acquired through these spirit-media, the inquisitors learned that Antichrist was already come; that printing, and the invention of it, were alike accursed, and similar information. Madeleine, tortured and imprisoned in the most loathsome dungeon, was reduced to such a condition of extreme horror and dread, that from this time she was the mere instrument of her atrocious judges. Having been intimate with the wizard, she could inform them of the position of the 'secret marks' on his person: these were ascertained in the usual way by pricking with needles. Gauffridi, by various torture, was induced to make the required confession, and was burned alive at Aix, April 30, 1611.

124 M. Maury, in a philosophical and learned work (La Magie et l'Astrologie dans l'Antiquité et au Moyen ge), has scientifically explored and exposed the mysteries of these and the like ecstatic phenomena, of such frequent occurrence in Protestant as well as in Catholic countries; in the orphan-houses of Amsterdam and Horn, as well as in the convents of France and Italy in the 17th century. And the Protestant revivalists of the present age have in great measure reproduced these curious results of religious excitement.

Demoniacal possession was a mania in France in the seventeenth century. The story of Madeleine Bavent, as reported, reveals the utmost licentiousness and fiendish cruelty.125 Gibbon justly observes that ancient Rome supported with the greatest difficulty the institution of six vestals, notwithstanding the certain fate of a living grave for those who could not preserve their chastity; and Christian Rome was filled with many thousands of both sexes bound by vows to perpetual virginity. Madeleine was seduced by her Franciscan confessor when only fourteen; and she entered a convent lately founded at Louviers. In this building, surrounded by a wood, and situated in a suitable spot, some strange practices were carried on. At the instigation of their director, a priest called David, the nuns, it is reported, were seized with an irresistible desire of imitating the primitive Adamite simplicity: the novices were compelled to return to the simple nudity of the days of innocence when taking exercise in the conventual gardens, and even at their devotions in the chapel. The novice Madeleine, on one occasion, was reprimanded for concealing her bosom with the altar-cloth at communion. She was originally of a pure and artless mind; and only gradually and stealthily she was corrupted by the pious arguments of her priest. This man, Picart by name-one of that extensive class the 'tristes obsc?ni,' of whom the Angelos and Tartuffes126 are representatives-succeeded to the vacant office of directing confessor to the nuns of Louviers; and at once embraced the opportunities of the confessional. Without repeating all the disgusting scenes that followed, as given by Michelet, it is only necessary to add that the miserable nun became the mistress and helpless creature of her seducer. 'He employed her as a magical charm to gain over the rest of the nuns. A holy wafer steeped in Madeleine's blood and buried in the garden would be sure to disturb their senses and their minds. This was the very year in which Urban Grandier was burned. Throughout France men spoke of nothing but the devils of Loudun.... Madeleine fancied herself bewitched and knocked about by devils; followed about by a lewd cat with eyes of fire. By degrees other nuns caught the disorder, which showed itself in odd supernatural jerks and writhings.'

125 It is but one instance of innumerable amours within the secret penetralia of the privileged conventual establishments. In the dark recesses of these vestal institutions on a gigantic scale, where publicity, that sole security, was never known, what vices or even crimes could not be safely perpetrated? Luther, who proved in the most practical way his contempt for the sanctity of monastic vows by eloping with a nun, assures us, among other scandals attaching to convent life, of the fact that when a fish-pond adjoining one of these establishments in Rome was drained off, six thousand infant skulls were exposed to view. A story which may be fact or fiction. But while fully admitting the probability of invention and exaggeration in the relations of enemies, and the fact that undue prejudice is likely to somewhat exaggerate the probable evils of the mysterious and unknown, how could it be otherwise than that during fourteen centuries many crimes should have been committed in those silent and safe retreats? Nor, indeed, is experience opposed to the possibility of the highest fervour of an unnatural enthusiasm being compatible with more human passions. The virgin who,

'Ut flos in septis secretus nascitur hortis

Ignotus pecori,'

as eulogised by the virgin-chorus in the beautiful epithalamium of Catullus, might be recognised in the youthful 'religieuse' if only human passion could be excluded; but the story of Heloise and Abelard is not a solitary proof of the superiority of human nature over an impossible and artificial spirituality.

126 As Tartuffe privately confesses,

'L'amour qui nous attache aux beautés éternelles

N'étouffe pas en nous l'amour des temporelles.

* * * * *

Pour être dévot, je n'en suis pas moins homme.'

The Superior was not averse to the publication of these events, having the example and reputation of Loudun before her. Little is new in the possession and exorcism: for the most part they are a repetition of those of Aix and Loudun. During a brief interval the devils were less outrageous: for the Cardinal-minister was meditating a reform of the monastic establishments. Upon his death they commenced again with equal violence. Picart was now dead-but not so the persecution of his victim. The priests recommenced miracle-working with renewed vigour.127 Saved from immediate death by a fortunate or, as it may be deemed, unfortunate sensitiveness to bodily pain, she was condemned for the rest of her life to solitary confinement in a fearful dungeon, in the language of her judges to an in pace. There lying tortured, powerless in a loathsome cell, their prisoner was alternately coaxed and threatened into admitting all sorts of crimes, and implicating whom they wished.128 The further cruelties to which the lust, and afterwards the malignancy, of her gaolers submitted her were not brought to an end by the interference of parliament in August 1647, when the destruction of the Louviers establishment was decreed. The guilty escaped by securing, by intimidation, the silence of their prisoner, who remained a living corpse in the dungeons of the episcopal palace of Rouen. The bones of Picart were exhumed, and publicly burned; the curé Boullé, an accomplice, was dragged on a hurdle to the fish-market, and there burned at the stake. So terminated this last of the trilogical series. But the hysterical or demoniacal disease was as furious as ever in Germany in the middle of the eighteenth century; and was attended with as tremendous effects at Würzburg as at Louviers.

127 To the diabolic visions of the other they opposed those of 'a certain Anne of the Nativity, a girl of sanguine hysterical temperament, frantic at need, and half mad-so far at least as to believe in her own lies. A kind of dog-fight was got up between the two. They besmeared each other with false charges. Anne saw the devil quite naked by Madeleine's side. Madeleine swore to seeing Anne at the Sabbath with the Lady Superior, the Mother Assistant, and the Mother of the novices.... Madeleine was condemned, without a hearing, to be disgraced, to have her body examined for the marks of the devil. They tore off her veil and gown, and made her the wretched sport of a vile curiosity that would have pierced till she bled again in order to win the right of sending her to the stake. Leaving to no one else the care of a scrutiny which was in itself a torture, these virgins, acting as matrons, ascertained if she were with child or no; shaved all her body, and dug their needles into her quivering flesh to find out the insensible spots.'-La Sorcière.

128 The horrified reader may see the fuller details of this case in Michelet's La Sorcière, who takes occasion to state that, than 'The History of Madeleine Bavent, a nun of Louviers, with her examination, &c., 1652, Rouen,' he knows of 'no book more important, more dreadful, or worthier of being reprinted. It is the most powerful narrative of its class. Piety Afflicted, by the Capuchin Esprit de Bosrager, is a work immortal in the annals of tomfoolery. The two excellent pamphlets by the doughty surgeon Yvelin, the Inquiry and the Apology, are in the Library of Ste. Geneviève.'-La Sorcière, the Witch of the Middle Ages, chap. viii. Whatever exaggeration there may possibly be in any of the details of these and similar histories, there is not any reasonable doubt of their general truth. It is much to be wished, indeed, that writers should, in these cases, always confine themselves to the simple facts, which need not any imaginary or fictitious additions.

In Germany during the seventeenth century witches felt the fury of both Catholic and Protestant zeal; but in the previous age prosecutions are directed against Protestant witches. They abounded in Upper Germany in the time of Innocent VIII., and what numbers were executed has been already seen. When the revolutionary party had acquired greater strength and its power was established, they vied with the conservatives in their vigorous attacks upon the empire of Satan.

Luther had been sensible to the contagious fear that the great spiritual enemy was actually fighting in the ranks of his enemies. He had personal experience of his hostility. Immured for his safety in a voluntary but gloomy prison, occupied intensely in the plan of a mighty revolution against the most powerful hierarchy that has ever existed, engaged continuously in the laborious task of translating the Sacred Scriptures, only partially freed from the prejudices of education, it is little surprising that the antagonist of the Church should have experienced infernal hallucinations. This weakness of the champion of Protestantism is at least more excusable than the pedantic folly of the head of the English Church. When Luther, however, could seriously affirm that witchcraft 'is the devil's proper work wherewith, when God permits, he not only hurts people but makes away with them; for in this world we are as guests and strangers, body and soul, cast under the devil: that idiots, the lame, the blind, the dumb are men in whom ignorant devils have established themselves, and all the physicians who attempt to heal these infirmities as though they proceeded from natural causes, are ignorant blockheads who know nothing about the power of the demon,' we cannot be indignant at the blind credulity of the masses of the people. It appears inconsistent that Luther, averse generally to supernaturalism, should yet find no difficulty in entertaining these irrational diabolistic ideas. The circumstances of his life and times sufficiently explain the inconsistency.129

129 The following sentence in his recorded conversation, when the free thoughts of the Reformer were unrestrained in the presence of his most intimate friends, is suggestive. 'I know,' says he, 'the devil thoroughly well; he has over and over pressed me so close that I scarcely knew whether I was alive or dead. Sometimes he has thrown me into such despair that I even knew not that there is a God, and had great doubts about our dear Lord Christ. But the Word of God has speedily restored me' (Luther's Tischreden or Table Talk, as cited in Howitt's History of the Supernatural). The eloquent controversialist Bossuet and the Catholics have been careful to avail themselves of the impetuosity and incautiousness of the great German Reformer.

Of all the leaders of the religious revolution of the sixteenth century, the Reformer of Zurich was probably the most liberally inclined; and Zuinglius' unusual charity towards those ancient sages and others who were ignorant of Christianity, which induced him to place the names of Aristides, Socrates, the Gracchi, &c., in the same list with those of Moses, Isaiah, and St. Paul, who should meet in the assembly of the virtuous and just in the future life, obliged Luther openly to profess of his friend that 'he despaired of his salvation,' and has provoked the indignation of the bishop of Meaux.-Variations des Eglises Protestantes, ii. 19 and 20.

On the eve of the prolonged and ferocious struggle on the continent between Catholicism and Protestantism a wholesale slaughter of witches and wizards was effected, a fitting prologue to the religious barbarities of the Thirty Years' War. Fires were kindled almost simultaneously in two different places, at Bamburg and Würzburg; and seldom, even in the annals of witchcraft, have they burned more tremendously. The prince-bishops of those territories had long been anxious to extirpate Lutheranism from their dioceses. Frederick Forner, Suffragan of Bamburg, a vigorous supporter of the Jesuits, was the chief agent of John George II. He waged war upon the heretical sorcerers in the 'whole armour of God,' Panoplia armatur? Dei. According to the statements of credible historians, nine hundred trials took place in the two courts of Bamburg and Zeil between 1625 and 1630. Six hundred were burned by Bishop George II. No one was spared. The chancellor, his son, Dr. Horn, with his wife and daughters, many of the lords and councillors of the bishop's court, women and priests, suffered. After tortures of the most extravagant kind it was extorted that some twelve hundred of them were confederated to bewitch the entire land to the extent that 'there would have been neither wine nor corn in the country, and that thereby man and beast would have perished with hunger, and men would be driven to eat one another. There were even some Catholic priests among them who had been led into practices too dreadful to be described, and they confessed among other things that they had baptized many children in the devil's name. It must be stated that these confessions were made under tortures of the most fearful kind, far more so than anything that was practised in France or other countries.... The number brought to trial in these terrible proceedings were so great, and they were treated with so little consideration, that it was usual not even to take the trouble of setting down their names; but they were cited as the accused Nos. 1, 2, 3, &c. The Jesuits took their confessions in private, and they made up the lists of those who were understood to have been denounced by them.'

More destructive still were the burnings of Würzburg at the same period under the superintendence of Philip Adolph, who ascended the episcopal throne in 1623. In spite of the energy of his predecessors, a grand confederacy of sorcerers had been discovered, and were at once denounced.130

130 'A catalogue of nine and twenty br?nde or burnings during a very short period of time, previous to the February of 1629, will give the best notion of the horrible character of these proceedings; it is printed,' adds Mr. Wright, 'from the original records in Hauber's Bibliotheca Magica.' E.g. in the Fifth Br?nde are enumerated: (1) Latz, an eminent shopkeeper. (2) Rutscher, a shopkeeper. (3) The housekeeper of the Dean of the cathedral. (4) The old wife of the Court ropemaker. (5) Jos. Sternbach's housekeeper. (6) The wife of Baunach, a Senator. (7) A woman named Znickel Babel. (8) An old woman. In the Sixteenth Burning: (1) A noble page of Ratzenstein. (2) A boy of ten years of age. (3, 4, 5) The two daughters of the Steward of the Senate and his maid. (6) The fat ropemaker's wife. In the Twentieth Burning: (1) Gobel's child, the most beautiful girl in Würzburg. (2) A student on the fifth form, who knew many languages, and was an excellent musician. (3, 4) Two boys from the New Minster, each twelve years old. (5) Stepper's little daughter. (6) The woman who kept the bridge gate. In the Twenty-sixth Burning are specified: (1) David Hans, a Canon in the New Minster. (2) Weydenbusch, a Senator. (3) The innkeeper's wife of the Baumgarten. (4) An old woman. (5) The little daughter of Valkenberger was privately executed and burned on her bier. (6) The little son of the town council bailiff. (7) Herr Wagner, vicar in the cathedral, was burned alive.-Narratives of Sorcery and Magic. The facts are taken from Dr. Soldan's Geschichte der Hexenprocesse, whose materials are to be found in Horst's Zauber Bibliothek and Hauber's Bibliotheca Magica.

Nine appears to have been the greatest number, and sometimes only two were sent to execution at once. Five are specially recorded as having been burned alive. The victims are of all professions and trades-vicars, canons, goldsmiths, butchers, &c. Besides the twenty-nine conflagrations recorded, many others were lighted about the same time: the names of whose prey are not written in the Book of Death. Frederick Spee, a Jesuit, formerly a violent enemy of the witches, but who had himself been incriminated by their extorted confessions at these holocausts, was converted to the opposite side, and wrote the 'Cautio Criminalis,' in which the necessity of caution in receiving evidence is insisted upon-a caution, without doubt, 'very necessary at that time for the magistracy throughout Germany.' All over Germany executions, if not everywhere so indiscriminately destructive as those in Franconia and at Würzburg, were incessant: and it is hardly the language of hyperbole to say that no province, no city, no village was without its condemned.

* * *

CHAPTER VII.

Scotland one of the most Superstitious Countries in Europe-Scott's Relation of the Barbarities perpetrated in the Witch-trials under the auspices of James VI.-The Fate of Agnes Sampson, Euphane MacCalzean, &c.-Irrational Conduct of the Courts of Justice-Causes of voluntary Witch-confessions-Testimony of Sir G. Mackenzie, &c.-Trial and Execution of Margaret Barclay-Computation of the number of Witches who suffered death in England and Scotland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries-Witches burned alive at Edinburgh in 1608-The Lancashire Witches-Sir Thomas Overbury and Dr. Forman-Margaret Flower and Lord Rosse.

Scotland, by the physical features of the country and by the character and habits of the people, is eminently apt for the reception of the magical and supernatural of any kind;131 and during the century from 1563 it was almost entirely subject to the dominion of Satan. Sir Walter Scott has narrated some of the most prominent cases and trials in the northern part of the island. The series may be said to commence from the confederated conspiracy of hell to prevent the union of James VI. with the Princess Anne of Denmark. An overwhelming tempest at sea during the voyage of these anti-papal, anti-diabolic royal personages was the appointed means of their destruction.

131 A late philosophic writer has ventured to institute a comparison in point of superstition and religious intolerance between Spain and Scotland. The latter country, however, has denied to political what it conceded to priestly government: hence its superior material progress and prosperity.-Buckle's History of Civilisation in England.

The human agents were Agnes Sampson, the wise wife of Keith (one of the better sort, who cured diseases, &c.); Dame Euphane MacCalzean, widow of a senator of the College of Justice, and a Catholic; Dr. John Fian or Cunninghame, a man of some learning, and of much skill in poison as well as in magic; Barbara Napier or Douglas; Geillis Duncan; with about thirty other women of the lowest condition. 'When the monarch of Scotland sprung this strong covey of his favourite game, they afforded the Privy Council and himself sport for the greatest part of the remaining winter. He attended on the examinations himself.... Agnes Sampson, after being an hour tortured by the twisting of a cord around her head according to the custom of the buccaneers, confessed that she had consulted with one Richard Grahame concerning the probable length of the king's life and the means of shortening it. But Satan, to whom at length they resorted for advice, told them in French respecting King James, Il est un homme de Dieu. The poor woman also acknowledged that she had held a meeting with those of her sisterhood, who had charmed a cat by certain spells, having four joints of men knit to its feet, which they threw into the sea to excite a tempest: they embarked in sieves with much mirth and jollity, the fiend rolling himself before them upon the waves dimly seen, and resembling a huge haystack in size and appearance. They went on board of a foreign ship richly laden with wines, where, invisible to the crew, they feasted till the sport grew tiresome; and then Satan sunk the vessel and all on board. Fian or Cunninghame was also visited by the sharpest tortures, ordinary and extraordinary. The nails were torn from his fingers with smiths' pincers; pins were driven into the places which the nails usually defended; his knees were crushed in the boots; his finger-bones were splintered in the pilniewincks. At length his constancy, hitherto sustained, as the bystanders supposed, by the help of the devil, was fairly overcome; and he gave an account of a great witch-meeting at North Berwick, where they paced round the church withershins-i. e. in reverse of the motion of the sun. Fian then blew into the lock of the church door, whereupon the bolts gave way: the unhallowed crew entered, and their master the devil appeared to his servants in the shape of a black man occupying the pulpit. He was saluted with a "Hail, Master!" but the company were dissatisfied with his not having brought a picture of the king, repeatedly promised, which was to place his Majesty at the mercy of this infernal crew.... The devil, on this memorable occasion, forgot himself, and called Fian by his own name instead of the demoniacal sobriquet of Rob the Rowan, which had been assigned to him as Master of the Rows or Rolls. This was considered as bad taste; and the rule is still observed at every rendezvous of forgers, smugglers, or the like, where it is accounted very indifferent manners to name an individual by his own name in case of affording ground of evidence which may upon a day of trial be brought against him. Satan, something disconcerted, concluded the evening with a divertissement and a dance after his own manner. The former consisted in disinterring a new-buried corpse, and dividing it in fragments among the company; and the ball was maintained by well-nigh two hundred persons, who danced a ring dance.... Dr. Fian, muffled, led the ring, and was highly honoured, generally acting as clerk or recorder. King James was deeply interested in those mysterious meetings, and took great delight to be present at the examinations of the accused. He sent for Geillis Duncan, and caused her to play before him the same tune to which Satan and his companions led the brawl in North Berwick churchyard. His ears were gratified in another way: for at this meeting it was said the witches demanded of the devil why he did bear such enmity against the king, who returned the flattering answer, that the king was the greatest enemy whom he had in the world. Almost all these poor wretches were executed: nor did Euphane MacCalzean's station in life save her from the common doom, which was strangling to death and burning to ashes thereafter. The majority of the jury which tried Barbara Napier, having acquitted her of attendance at the North Berwick meeting, were themselves threatened with a trial for wilful error upon an assize, and could only escape from severe censure and punishment by pleading guilty, and submitting themselves to the king's pleasure. The alterations and trenching,' adds Scott, 'which lately took place on the Castle-hill at Edinburgh for the purpose of forming the new approach to the city from the west, displayed the ashes of the numbers who had perished in this manner, of whom a large proportion must have been executed between 1590-when the great discovery was made concerning Euphane MacCalzean and the wise wife of Keith and their accomplices-and the union of the crowns.'132

132 Sir W. Scott's Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, ix.

Euphane's exceptional doom was 'to be bound to the stake, and burned in ashes quick to the death.' 'Burning quick' was not an uncommon sentence: if the less cruel one of hanging or strangling first and afterwards burning was more usual. Thirty warlocks and witches was the total number executed on June 25th, 1591. A few, like Dr. Cunninghame, may have been really experienced in the use of poison and poisonous drugs. The art of poisoning has been practised perhaps almost as extensively as (often coextensively with) that of sorcery; a tremendous and mostly inscrutable crime which science, in all ages, has been able more surely to conceal than to detect.

Two facts eminently illustrate the barbarous iniquity of the Courts of Justice when dealing with their witch prisoners. An expressed malediction, or frequently an almost inaudible mutter, followed by the coincident fulfilment of the imprecation, was accepted eagerly by the judges as sufficient proof (an antecedent one, contrary to the boasted principle of English law at least, which assumes the innocence until the guilt has been proved, of the accused) of the crime of the person arraigned. And they complacently attributed to conscious guilt the ravings produced by an excruciating torture-that equally inhuman and irrational invention of judicial cruelty; confidently boasting that they were careful to sentence no person without previous confession duly made.

But these confessions not seldom were partly extracted from a natural wish to be freed from the persecution of neighbours as well as from present bodily torture. Sir George Mackenzie, Lord Advocate of Scotland during the period of the greatest fury, and himself president at many of the trials, a believer, among other cases in his Criminal Law, 1678, relates that of a condemned witch who had confessed judicially to him and afterwards 'told me under secrecy, that she had not confessed because she was guilty; but being a poor creature who wrought for her meat, and being defamed for a witch she knew she should starve, for no person thereafter would either give her meat or lodging, and that all men would beat her and set dogs at her, and that therefore she desired to be out of the world. Whereupon she wept most bitterly, and upon her knees called God to witness to what she said. Another told me that she was afraid the devil would challenge a right to her after she was said to be his servant, and would haunt her, as the minister said when he was desiring her to confess, and therefore she desired to die. And really,' admits the learned judge, 'ministers are oft-times indiscreet in their zeal to have poor creatures to confess in this; and I recommend to judges that the wisest ministers should be sent to them; and that those who are sent should be cautious in this particular.' Another confession at the supreme moment of the same sort, as recorded by the Rev. G. Sinclair in 'Satan's Invisible World Discovered' is equally significant and genuine. What impression it left upon the pious clergyman will be seen in his concluding inference. The witch, 'being carried forth to the place of execution, remained silent during the first, second, and third prayer, and then, perceiving there remained no more but to rise up and go to the stake, she lifted up her body and with a loud voice cried out, "Now all you that see me this day know that I am now to die as a witch by my own confession, and I free all men, especially the ministers and magistrates, of the guilt of my blood. I take it wholly upon myself-my blood be upon my own head; and as I must make answer to the God of heaven presently, I declare I am as free of witchcraft as any child. But being delated by a malicious woman, and put in prison under the name of a witch; disowned by my husband and friends, and seeing no ground of hope of my coming out of prison or ever coming in credit again, through the temptation of the devil I made up that confession on purpose to destroy my own life, being weary of it, and choosing rather to die than live"-and so died; which lamentable story as it did then astonish all the spectators, none of which could restrain themselves from tears, so it may be to all a demonstration of Satan's subtlety, whose design is still to destroy all, partly by tempting many to presumption, and some others to despair.'

The trial of Margaret Barclay took place in 1613. Her crime consisted in having caused by means of spells the loss of a ship at sea. She was said to have had a quarrel with the owner of the shipwrecked vessel, in the course of which she uttered a wish that all on board might sink to the bottom of the sea. Her imprecation was accomplished, and upon the testimony of an itinerant juggler, John Stewart, she was arraigned before a Court of Justice. With the help of the devil in the shape of a handsome black dog, she had moulded some figures of clay representing the doomed sailors, which with the prescribed rites were thrown into the deep. We are informed by the reporters of the proceedings at this examination, that 'after using this kind of gentle torture [viz. placing the legs in a pair of stocks and laying on gradually increasing weights of iron bars], the said Margaret began, according to the increase of the pain, to cry and crave for God's cause to take off her shin the foresaid irons, and she should declare truly the whole matter. Which being removed, she began at her formal denial; and being of new assayed in torture as before, she then uttered these words: "Take off, take off! and before God I shall show you the whole form." And the said irons being of new, upon her faithful promise, removed, she then desired my Lord of Eglinton, the said four justices, and the said Mr. David Dickson, minister of the burgh; Mr. George Dunbar, minister of Ayr; Mr. Mitchell Wallace, minister of Kilmarnock; Mr. John Cunninghame, minister of Dalry; and Hugh Kennedy, provost of Ayr, to come by themselves and to remove all others, and she should declare truly, as she should answer to God, the whole matter. Whose desire in that being fulfilled, she made her confession in this manner without any kind of demand, freely without interrogation: God's name by earnest prayer being called upon for opening of her lips and easing of her heart, that she by rendering of the truth might glorify and magnify His holy name and disappoint the enemy of her salvation.'

One of those involved in the voluntary confession was Isabel Crawford, who was frightened into admitting the offences alleged. In court, when asked if she wished to be defended by counsel, Margaret Barclay, whose hopes and fears were revived at seeing her husband, answered, 'As you please; but all I have confessed was in agony of torture; and, before God, all I have spoken is false and untrue.' She was found guilty; sentenced to be strangled at the stake; her body to be burned to ashes. Isabel Crawford, after a short interval, was subjected to the same sort of examination: a new commission having been granted for the prosecution, and 'after the assistant-minister of Irvine, Mr. David Dickson, had made earnest prayers to God for opening her obdurate and closed heart, she was subjected to the torture of iron bars laid upon her bare shins, her feet being in the stocks. She endured this torture with incredible firmness, since she did "admirably, without any kind of din or exclamation, suffer above thirty stone of iron to be laid on her legs, never shrinking thereat in any sort, but remaining, as it were, steady." But in shifting the situation of the iron bars, and removing them to another part of her shins, her constancy gave way; she broke out into horrible cries of "Take off! take off!" On being relieved from the torture she made the usual confession of all that she was charged with, and of a connection with the devil which had subsisted for several years. Sentence was given against her accordingly. After this had been denounced she openly denied all her former confessions, and died without any sign of repentance; offering repeated interruptions to the minister in his prayers, and absolutely refusing to pardon the executioner.'133 It might be possible to form an imperfect estimate of how many thousands were sacrificed in the Jacobian persecution in Scotland alone from existing historical records, which would express, however, but a small proportion of the actual number: and parish registers may still attest the quantity of fuel provided at a considerable expense, and the number of the fires. By a moderate computation an average number of two hundred annually, making a total of eight thousand, are reckoned to have been burned in the last forty years of the sixteenth century.134

133 Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, ix.

The Scotch trials and tortures, of which the above cases are but one or two out of a hundred similar ones, are perhaps the more extraordinary as being the result of mere superstition: religious or political heresy being seldom an excuse for the punishment and an aggravation of the offence.

134 A larger proportion of victims than even those of the Holy Office during an equal space of time. According to Llorente (Hist. de l'Inquisition) from 1680 to 1781, the latter period of its despotism (which flourished especially under Charles II., himself, as he was convinced, a victim of witch-malice), between 13,000 and 14,000 persons suffered by various punishments: of which number, however, 1,578 were burned alive.

In England, from 1603 to 1680, seventy thousand persons are said to have been executed; and during the fifteen hundred years elapsed since the triumph of the Christian religion, millions are reckoned to have been sacrificed on the bloody altars of the Christian Moloch. An entry in the minutes of the proceedings in the Privy Council for 1608 reveals that even James's ministers began to experience some horror of the consequences of their instructions. And the following free testimony of one of them is truly 'an appalling record:'-'1608.-December 1.-The Earl of Mar declared to the council that some women were taken in Broughton [suburban Edinburgh] as witches, and being put to an assize and convicted, albeit they persevered constant in their denial to the end, yet they were burned quick after such a cruel manner that some of them died in despair, renouncing and blaspheming God; and others half-burned broke out of the fire, and were cast quick in it again till they were burned to the death.'135

135 The terrestrial and real Fiends seem to have striven to realise on earth and to emulate the 'Tartarus horrificos eructans faucibus ?stus' described by the Epicurean philosophic poet (Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, iii.).

Equally monstrous and degrading were the disclosures in the torture-chambers; and many admitted that they had had children by the devil. The circumstances of the Sabbath, the various rites of the compact, the forms and method of bewitching, the manner of sexual intercourse with the demons-these were the principal staple of the judicial examinations.

In the southern part of the island witch-hanging or burning proceeded with only less vehemence than in Scotland. One of the most celebrated cases in the earlier half of the seventeenth century (upon which Thomas Shadwell the poet laureate, who, under the name of MacFlecknoe, is immortalised by the satire of Dryden, founded a play) is the story of the Lancashire Witches. This persecution raged at two separate periods; first in 1613, when nineteen prisoners were brought before Sir James Altham and Sir Edward Bromley, Barons of Exchequer. Elizabeth Southern, known as 'Mother Demdike' in the poet laureate's drama, is the leader of the criminals. In 1634 the proceedings were renewed wholly on the evidence of a boy who, it was afterwards ascertained, had been instructed in his part against an old woman named Mother Dickenson. The evidence was of the feeblest sort; nor are its monotonous details worth repetition. Out of some forty persons implicated on both occasions, fortunately the greater number escaped. 'Lancashire Witches,' a term so hateful in its origin, has been long transferred to celebrate the superior charms (of another kind) of the ladies of Lancashire; and the witches' spells are those of natural youth and beauty.

The social position of Sir Thomas Overbury has made his fate notorious. An infamous plot had been invented by the Earl of Rochester (Robert Kerr) and the Countess of Essex to destroy a troublesome obstacle to their contemplated marriage. The practice of 'hellish charms' is only incidental; an episode in the dark mystery. Overbury was too well acquainted with royal secrets (whose disgusting and unnatural kind has been probably correctly conjectured), too important for the keeping of even a private secretary. His ruin was determined by the revenge of the noble lovers and sealed by the fear of the king. At the end of six months he had been gradually destroyed by secret poison in his prison in the Tower (to which for an alleged offence he had been committed) by the agency of Dr. Forman, a famous 'pharmaceutic,' under the auspices of the Earl of Rochester. This Dr. Forman had been previously employed by Lady Essex, a notorious dame d'honneur at James's Court, to bewitch the Earl to an irresistible love for her, an enchantment which required, apparently, no superhuman inducement. A Mrs. Turner, the countess's agent, was associated with this skilful conjuror. They were instructed also to bewitch Lord Essex, lately returned from abroad, in the opposite way-to divert his love from his wife.136

136 The husband was impracticable; he could not be disenchanted. Conjurations and charms failing, 'the countess was instructed to bring against the Earl of Essex a charge of conjugal incapacity: A commission of reverend prelates of the church was appointed to sit in judgment, over whom the king presided in person; and a jury of matrons was found to give their opinion that the Lady Essex was a maiden.' Divorce was accordingly pronounced, and with all possible haste the king married his favourite to the appellant with great pomp at Court. After the conspirators had been arraigned by the public indignation, a curious incident of the trial, according to a cotemporary report, was, that there being 'showed in court certain pictures of a man and a woman made in lead, and also a mould of brass wherein they were cast; a black scarf also full of white crosses which Mrs. Turner had in her custody; enchanted paps and other pictures [as well as a list of some of the devil's particular names used in conjuration], suddenly was heard a crack from the scaffold, which carried a great fear, tumult, and commotion amongst the spectators and through the hall; every one fearing hurt as if the devil had been present and grown angry to have his workmanship known by such as were not his own scholars' (Narratives of Sorcery and Magic, by Thomas Wright). Whatever may have been the crime or crimes for the knowledge of which Sir Thomas Overbury was doomed, it is significant that for his own safety the king was compelled to break an oath (sworn upon his knees before the judges he had purposely summoned, with an imprecation that God's curse might light upon him and his posterity for ever if he failed to bring the guilty to deserved punishment), and to not only pardon but remunerate his former favourite after he had been solemnly convicted and condemned to a felon's death. The crime, the knowledge of which prevented the appearance of Somerset at the gibbet or the scaffold, has been supposed by some, with scarcely sufficient cause or at least proof, to be the murder by the king of his son Prince Henry. Doubt has been strongly expressed of the implication at all of the favourite in the death of Overbury: the evidence produced at the trial about the poisoning being, it seems, made up to conceal or to mystify the real facts.

Two women were executed at Lincoln, in 1618, for bewitching Lord Rosse, eldest son of the Earl of Rutland, and others of the family-Lord Rosse being bewitched to death; also for preventing by diabolic arts the parents from having any more children. Before the Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas and one of the Barons of the Exchequer, it was proved that the witches had effected the death of the noble lord by burying his glove in the ground, and 'as that glove did rot and waste, so did the liver of the said lord rot and waste.' Margaret Flower confessed she had 'two familiar spirits sucking on her, the one white, the other black spotted. The white sucked under her left breast,' &c.

* * *

CHAPTER VIII.

The Literature of Europe in the Seventeenth Century proves the Universality and Horror of Witchcraft-The most acute and most liberal Men of Learning convinced of its Reality-Erasmus and Francis Bacon-Lawyers prejudiced by Legislation-Matthew Hale's judicial Assertion-Sir Thomas Browne's Testimony-John Selden-The English Church least Ferocious of the Protestant Sects-Jewell and Hooker-Independent Tolerance-Witchcraft under the Presbyterian Government-Matthew Hopkins-Gaule's 'Select Cases of Conscience'-Judicial and Popular Methods of Witch-discovery-Preventive Charms-Witchfinders a legal and numerous Class in England and Scotland-Remission in the Severity of the Persecution under the Protectorship.

Had we not the practical proof of the prevalence of the credit of the black art in accomplished facts, the literature of the first half of the seventeenth century would be sufficient testimony to its horrid dominion. The works of the great dramatists, the writings of men of every class, continually suppose the universal power and horror of witchcraft. Internal evidence is abundant. The witches of Macbeth are no fanciful creation, and Shakspeare's representation of La Pucelle's fate is nothing more than a copy from life. What the vulgar superstition must have been may be easily conceived when men of the greatest genius or learning credited the possibility, and not only a theoretical but actual occurrence, of these infernal phenomena. Gibbon is at a loss to account for the fact that the acute understanding of the learned Erasmus, who could see through much more plausible fables, believed firmly in witchcraft.137 Francis Bacon, the advocate and second founder of the inductive method and first apostle of the Utilitarian philosophy, opposed though he might have been to the vulgar persecution, was not able to get rid of the principles upon which the creed was based.138 Sir Edward Coke, his contemporary, the most acute lawyer of the age, or (as it is said) of any time, ventured even to define the devil's agents in witchcraft. Sir Thomas Browne (author of 'Pseudodoxia Epidemica' or 'Vulgar Errors!'), a physician and writer of considerable merit, and Sir Matthew Hale, in 1664, proved their faith, the one by his solemn testimony in open court, the other by his still more solemn sentence.

137 See Miscellaneous Works: Abstract of my Readings.

138 'Consorting with them [the unclean spirits who have fallen from their first estate] and all use of their assistance is unlawful; much more any worship or veneration whatsoever. But a contemplation and knowledge of their nature, power, illusions, not only from passages of sacred scripture but from reason or experience, is not the least part of spiritual wisdom. So truly the Apostle, "We are not ignorant of his wiles." And it is not less permissible in theology to investigate the nature of demons, than in physics to investigate the nature of drugs, or in ethics the nature of vice.'-De Augmentis Scientiarum, lib. iii. 2.

If theologians were armed by the authority or their interpretation of Scripture, lawyers were no less so by that of the Statute Book. Judge Hale, in an address to the jury at Bury St. Edmund's, carefully weighing evidence, and, summing up, assures them he did 'not in the least doubt there are witches: first, because the Scriptures affirmed it; secondly, because the wisdom of all nations, particularly of our own, had provided laws against witchcraft which implied their belief of such a crime.'139 Sir Thomas Browne, who gave his professional experience at this trial, to the effect that the devil often acts upon human bodies by natural means, afflicting them in a more surprising manner through the diseases to which they are usually subject; and that in the particular case, the fits (of vomiting nails, needles, deposed by other witnesses) might be natural, only raised to a great degree by the subtlety of the devil cooperating with the malice of the witches, employs a well-known argument when he declares ('Religio Medici'), 'Those that to confute their incredulity desire to see apparitions shall questionless never behold any. The devil hath these already in a heresy as capital as witchcraft; and to appear to them were but to convert them.'

139 Unfortunately for the cause of truth and right, Sir Matthew Hale's reasons are not an exceptional illustration of the mischief according to Roger Bacon's experience of 'three very bad arguments we are always using-This has been shown to be so; This is customary; This is universal: Therefore it must be kept to.' Sir Thomas Browne, unable, as a man of science, to accept in every particular alleged the actual bona fide reality of the devil's power, makes a compromise, and has 'recourse to a fraud of Satan,' explaining that he is in reality but a clever juggler, a transcendent physician who knows how to accomplish what is in relation to us a prodigy, in knowing how to use natural forces which our knowledge has not yet discovered. Such an unworthy compromise was certainly not fitted to arouse men from their 'cauchemar démonologique.'-See Révue des Deux Mondes, Aug. 1, 1858.

John Selden, a learned lawyer, but of a liberal mind, was gifted with a large amount of common sense, and it might be juster to attribute the dictum which has been supposed to betray 'a lurking belief' to an excess of legal, rather than to a defect of intellectual, perception. Selden, inferring that 'the law against witches does not prove there be any, but it punishes the malice of those people that use such means to take away men's lives,' proceeds to assert that 'if one should profess that by turning his hat thrice and crying "Buz," he could take away a man's life (though in truth he could do no such thing), yet this were a just law made by the state, that whosoever shall turn his hat ... with an intention to take away a man's life, should be put to death.'140

140 Table Talk or Discourses of John Selden. Although it must be excepted to the lawyer's summary mode of dealing with an imaginary offence, we prefer to give that eminent patriot at least the benefit of the doubt, as to his belief in witchcraft.

If men of more liberal sentiments were thus enslaved to old prejudices, it is not surprising that the Church, not leading but following, should firmly maintain them. Fortunately for the witches, without the motives actuating in different ways Catholics and Calvinists, and placed midway between both parties, the reformed English Church was not so much interested in identifying her crimes with sorcerers as in maintaining the less tremendous formul? of Divine right, Apostolical succession, and similar pretensions. Yet if they did not so furiously engage themselves in actual witch-prosecutions, Anglican divines have not been slow in expressly or impliedly affirming the reality of diabolical interposition. Nor can the most favourable criticism exonerate them from the reproach at least of having witnessed without protestation the barbarous cruelties practised in the name of heaven; and the eminent names of Bishop Jewell, the great apologist of the English Church, and of the author of the 'Ecclesiastical Polity,' among others less eminent, may be claimed by the advocates of witchcraft as respectable authorities in the Established Church. The 'judicious' Hooker affirms that the evil spirits are dispersed, some in the air, some on the earth, some in the waters, some among the minerals, in dens and caves that are under the earth, labouring to obstruct and, if possible, to destroy the works of God. They were the dii inferi [the old persuasion] of the heathen worshipped in oracles, in idols, &c.141 The privilege of 'casting out devils' was much cherished and long retained in the Established Church.

141 Quoted in Howitt's History of the Supernatural. The author has collected a mass of evidence 'demonstrating an universal faith,' a curious collection of various superstition. He is indignant at the colder faith of the Anglican Church of later times.

During the ascendency of the Presbyterian party from 1640 to the assumption of the Protectorship by Cromwell, witches and witch-trials increased more than ever; and they sensibly decreased only when the Independents obtained a superiority. The adherents of Cromwell, whatever may have been their own fanatical excesses, were at least exempt from the intolerant spirit which characterised alike their Anglican enemies and their old Presbyterian allies. The astute and vigorous intellect of the great revolutionary leader, the champion of the people in its struggles for civil and religious liberty, however much he might affect the forms of the prevailing religious sentiment, was too sagacious not to be able to penetrate, with the aid of the counsels of the author of the 'Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes,' who so triumphantly upheld the fundamental principle of Protestantism,142 somewhat beneath the surface. In what manner the Presbyterian Parliament issued commissions for inquiring into the crimes of sorcery, how zealously they were supported by the clergy and people, how Matthew Hopkins-immortal in the annals of English witchcraft-exercised his talents as witchfinder-general, are facts well known.143

142 'Seeing therefore,' infers Milton, the greatest of England's patriots as well as poets, 'that no man, no synod, no session of men, though called the Church, can judge definitively the sense of Scripture to another man's conscience, which is well known to be a maxim of the Protestant religion; it follows plainly, that he who holds in religion that belief or those opinions which to his conscience and utmost understanding appear with most evidence or probability in the Scripture, though to others he seem erroneous, can no more be justly censured for a heretic than his censurers, who do but the same thing themselves, while they censure him for so doing.... To Protestants therefore, whose common rule and touchstone is the Scripture, nothing can with more conscience, more equity, nothing more Protestantly can be permitted than a free and lawful debate at all times by writing, conference, or disputation of what opinion soever disputable by Scripture.... How many persecutions, then, imprisonments, banishments, penalties, and stripes; how much bloodshed, have the forcers of conscience to answer for-and Protestants rather than Papists!' (A Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes.) The reasons which induced Milton to exclude the Catholics of his day from the general toleration are more intelligible and more plausible, than those of fifty or sixty years since, when the Rev. Sidney Smith published the Letters of Peter Plymley.

143 Displayed in the satire of Hudibras, particularly in Part II. canto 3, Part III. 1, and the notes of Zachary Grey. The author of this amusing political satire has exposed the foibles of the great Puritan party with all the rancour of a partisan.

That the strenuous antagonists of despotic dogmas, by whom the principles of English liberty were first inaugurated, that they should so fanatically abandon their reason to a monstrous idea, is additional proof of the universality of superstitious prejudice. But the conviction, the result of a continual political religious persecution of their tenets, that if heaven was on their side Satan and the powers of darkness were still more inimical, cannot be fully understood unless by referring to those scenes of murder and torture. Hunted with relentless ferocity like wild beasts, holding conventicles and prayer meetings with the sword suspended over their heads, it is not surprising that at that period these English and Scotch Calvinists came to believe that they were the peculiar objects of diabolical as well as human malice. Their whole history during the first eighty years of the seventeenth century can alone explain this faith. Besides this genuine feeling, the clergy of the Presbyterian sect might be interested in maintaining a creed which must magnify their credit as miracle-workers.144

144 The author of Hudibras, in the interview of the Knight and Sidrophel (William Lilly), enumerates the various practices and uses of astrology and witchcraft in vogue at this time, and employed by Court and Parliament with equal eagerness and emulation. Dr. Zachary Grey, the sympathetic editor of Hudibras, supplies much curious information on the subject in extracts from various old writers. 'The Parliament,' as he states, 'took a sure way to secure all prophecies, prodigies, and almanac-news from stars, &c., in favour of their own side, by appointing a licenser thereof, and strictly forbidding and punishing all such as were not licensed. Their man for this purpose was the famous Booker, an astrologer, fortune-teller, almanac-maker, &c. The words of his license in Rushorth are very remarkable-for mathematics, almanacs, and prognostications. If we may believe Lilly, both he and Booker did conjure and prognosticate well for their friends the Parliament. He tells us, "When he applied for a license for his Merlinus Anglicus Junior (in Ap. 1644), Booker wondered at the book, made many impertinent obliterations, framed many objections, and swore it was not possible to distinguish between a king and a parliament; and at last licensed it according to his own fancy. Lilly delivered it to the printer, who, being an arch-Presbyterian, had five of the ministers to inspect it, who could make nothing of it, but said it might be printed; for in that he meddled not with their Dagon." (Lilly's Life.) Which opposition to Lilly's book arose from a jealousy that he was not then thoroughly in the Parliament's interest-which was true; for he frankly confesses, "that till the year 1645 he was more Cavalier than Roundhead, and so taken notice of; but after that he engaged body and soul in the cause of the Parliament."' (Life.) Lilly was succeeded successively by his assistant Henry Coley, and John Partridge, the well-known object of Swift's satire.

The years 1644 and 1645 are distinguished as especially abounding in witches and witchfinders. In the former year, at Manningtree, a village in Essex, during an outbreak in which several women were tried and hanged, Matthew Hopkins first displayed his peculiar talent. Associated with him in his recognised legal profession was one John Sterne. They proceeded regularly on their circuit, making a fixed charge for their services upon each town or village. Swimming and searching for secret marks were the infallible methods of discovery. Hopkins, encouraged by an unexpected success, arrogantly assumed the title of 'Witchfinder-General.' His modest charges (as he has told us) were twenty shillings a town, which paid the expenses of travelling and living, and an additional twenty shillings a head for every criminal brought to trial, or at least to execution.

The eastern counties of Huntingdon, Cambridge, Suffolk, Northampton, Bedford, were chiefly traversed; and some two or three hundred persons appear to have been sent to the gibbet or the stake by his active exertions. One of these specially remembered was the aged parson of a village near Framlingham, Mr. Lowes, who was hanged at Bury St. Edmund's. The pious Baxter, an eyewitness, thus commemorates the event: 'The hanging of a great number of witches in 1645 and 1646 is famously known. Mr. Calamy went along with the judges on the circuit to hear their confessions and see that there was no fraud or wrong done them. I spoke with many understanding, pious, learned, and credible persons that lived in the counties, and some that went to them in the prison and heard their sad confessions. Among the rest, an old reading parson named Lowes, not far from Framlingham, was one that was hanged, who confessed that he had two imps, and that one of them was always putting him upon doing mischief; and he being near the sea as he saw a ship under sail, it moved him to send it to sink the ship, and he consented and saw the ship sink before them.' Sterne, Hopkins's coadjutor, in an Apology published not long afterwards, asserts that Lowes had been indicted thirty years before for witchcraft; that he had made a covenant with the devil, sealing it with his blood, and had those familiars or spirits which sucked on the marks found on his body; that he had confessed that, besides the notable mischief of sinking the aforesaid vessel and making fourteen widows in one quarter of an hour, he had effected many other calamities; that far from repenting of his wickedness, he rejoiced in the power of his imps.

The excessive destruction and cruelty perpetrated by the indiscriminate procedure of the Witchfinder-General incited a Mr. Gaule, vicar of Great Staughton in Huntingdonshire, to urge some objections to the inhuman character of his method. Gaule, like John Cotta before him and others of that class, was provoked to challenge the propriety of the ordinary prosecutions, not so much from incredulity as from humanity, which revolted at the extravagance of the judges' cruelty. In 'Select Cases of Conscience touching Witches and Witchcraft,' the minister of Great Staughton describes from personal knowledge one of the ordinary ways of detecting the guilt of the accused. 'Having taken the suspected witch, she is placed in the middle of a room upon a stool or table, cross-legged, or in some other uneasy position, to which, if she submits not, she is then bound with cords: there is she watched and kept without meat or sleep for the space of four-and-twenty hours (for they say within that time they shall see her imps come and suck); a little hole is likewise made in the door for the imps to come in at, and, lest they should come in some less discernible shape, they that watch are taught to be ever and anon sweeping the room, and if they see any spiders or flies to kill them; and if they cannot kill them, then they may be sure they are her imps.'

'Swimming' and 'pricking' were the approved modes of discovery. By the former method the witch was stripped naked, securely bound (hands and feet being crossed), rolled up in a blanket or cloth, and carried to the nearest water, upon which she was laid on her back, with the alternative of floating or sinking. In case of the former event (the water not seldom refusing to receive the wretch, because-declares James I.-they had impiously thrown off the holy water of baptism) she was rescued for the fire or the gallows; while, in case of sinking to the bottom, she would be properly and clearly acquitted of the suspected guilt. Hopkins prided himself most on his ability for detecting special marks. Causing the suspected woman to be stripped naked, or as far as the waist (as the case might be), sometimes in public, this stigmatic professor began to search for the hidden signs with unsparing scrutiny. Upon finding a mole or wart or any similar mark, they tried the 'insensibleness thereof' by inserting needles, pins, awls, or any sharp-pointed instrument; and in an old and withered crone it might not be difficult to find somewhere a more insensitive spot.

Such examinations were conducted with disregard equally for humanity and decency. All the disgusting circumstances must be sought for in the works of the writers upon the subject. Reginald Scot has collected many of the commonest. These marks were considered to be teats at which the demons or imps were used to be suckled. Many were the judicial and vulgar methods of detecting the guilty-by repeating the 'Lord's Prayer;' weighing against the church Bible; making them shed tears-for a witch can shed tears only with the left eye, and that only with difficulty and in limited quantity. The counteracting or preventive charms are as numerous as curious, not a few being in repute in some parts at this day. 'Drawing blood' was most effective. Nailing up a horse-shoe is one of the best-known preventives. That efficacious counter-charm used to be suspended over the entrance of churches and houses, and no wizard or witch could brave it.145 'Scoring above the breath' is omnipotent in Scotland, where the witch was cut or 'scotched' on the face and forehead. Cutting off secretly a lock of the hair of the accused, burning the thatch of her roof and the thing bewitched; these are a few of the least offensive or obscene practices in counter-charming.146 In what degree or kind the Fetish-charms of the African savages are more ridiculous or disgusting than those popular in England 200 years ago, it would not be easy to determine.

145 Gay's witch complains:

'Straws, laid across, my pace retard.

The horse-shoe's nailed, each threshold's guard.

The stunted broom the wenches hide

For fear that I should up and ride.

They stick with pins my bleeding seat,

And bid me show my secret teat.'

146 The various love-charms, amulets, and spells in the pharmacy of witchcraft are (like the waxen image known, both to the ancient and modern art) equally monstrous and absurd. Of a more natural and pleasing sort was the ?μ?? ποικ?λο?, the irresistible charm of Aphrodite. Here-

θελκτ?ρια π?ντα τ?τυκτο?

?νθ? ?νι μ?ν φιλ?τη?, ?ν δ? ?μερο?, ?ν δ? ?αριστ??,

Π?ρφασι?, ? τ? ?κλεψε ν?ον π?κα περ φρονε?ντων.

Matthew Hopkins pursued a lucrative trade in witch-hunting for some years with much applause and success. His indiscriminating accusations at last excited either the alarm or the indignation of his townspeople, if we may believe the tradition suggested in the well-known verses of Butler, who has no authority, apparently, for his insinuation ('Hudibras,' ii. 3), that this eminent Malleus did not die 'the common death of all men.' However it happened, his death is placed in the year 1647. An Apology shortly before had been published by him in refutation of an injurious report gaining ground that he was himself intimately allied with the devil, from whom he had obtained a memorandum book in which were entered the names of all the witches in England. It is entitled 'The Discovery of Witches; in Answer to several Queries lately delivered to the Judge of Assize for the County of Norfolk; and now published by Matthew Hopkins, Witchfinder, for the Benefit of the whole Kingdom. Printed for R. Royston, at the Angel in Inn Lane, 1647.'147 It is, indeed, sufficiently probable that, confident of the increasing coolness, and perhaps of the wishes, of the magistrates, the mob, ever ready to wreak vengeance upon a disgraced favourite who has long abused the public patience, retaliated upon Hopkins a method of torture he had frequently inflicted upon others.148

147 Quoted by Sir W. Scott from a copy of this 'very rare tract' in his possession.

148 Dr. Francis Hutchinson (Historical Essay), referring to the verses of Samuel Butler, says that he had often heard that some persons, 'out of indignation at the barbarity [of the witchfinder], took him and tied his own thumbs and toes, as he used to tie others; and when he was put into the water, he himself swam as they did.' But whether the usual fate upon that event awaited him does not appear. The verses in question are the following:-

'has not he, within a year,

Hang'd threescore of 'em in one shire,

* * * * *

Who after prov'd himself a witch,

And made a rod for his own breech?'

The Knight's Squire on the same occasion reminds his master of the more notorious of the devil's tricks of that and the last age:-

'Did not the devil appear to Martin

Luther in Germany for certain,

And would have gull'd him with a trick

But Mart was too, too politic?

Did he not help the Dutch to purge

At Antwerp their cathedral church?

Sing catches to the saints at Mascon,

And tell them all they came to ask him?

Appear in divers shapes to Kelly,

And speak i' th' nun of Loudun's belly?

Meet with the Parliament's committee

At Woodstock on a pers'nal treaty?

... &c. &c.'

Hudibras, ii. 3.

Hopkins is the most famous of his class on account of his superior talent; but both in England and Scotland witchfinders, or prickers, as they were sometimes called, before and since his time abounded-of course most where the superstition raged fiercest. In Scotland they infested all parts of the country, practising their detestable but legal trade with entire impunity. The Scottish prickers enjoyed a great reputation for skill and success; and on a special occasion, about the time when Hopkins was practising in the South, the magistrates of Newcastle-upon-Tyne summoned from Scotland one of great professional experience to visit that town, then overrun with witches. The magistrates agreed to pay him all travelling expenses, and twenty shillings for every convicted criminal. A bellman was sent round the town to invite all complainants to prefer their charges. Some thirty women, having been brought to the town-hall, were publicly subjected to an examination. By the ordinary process, twenty-seven on this single occasion were ascertained to be guilty, of whom, at the ensuing assizes, fourteen women and one man were convicted by the jury and executed.

Three thousand are said to have suffered for the crime in England under the supremacy of the Long Parliament. A respite followed on this bloody persecution when the Independents came into power, but it was renewed with almost as much violence upon the return of the Stuarts. The Protectorship had been fitly inaugurated by the rational protest of a gentleman, witness to the proceedings at one of the trials, Sir Robert Filmore, in a tract, 'An Advertizement to the Jurymen of England touching Witches.' This was followed two years later by a similar protest by one Thomas Ady, called, 'A Candle in the Dark; or, a Treatise concerning the Nature of Witches and Witchcraft: being Advice to Judges, Sheriffs, Justices of the Peace and Grand Jurymen, what to do before they pass Sentence on such as are arraigned for their Lives as Witches.' Notwithstanding the general toleration of the Commonwealth, in 1652, the year before Cromwell assumed the Dictatorship (1653-1658), there appeared to be a tendency to return to the old system, and several were executed in different parts of the country. Six were hanged at Maidstone. 'Some there were that wished rather they might be burned to ashes, alleging that it was a received opinion amongst many that the body of a witch being burned, her blood is thereby prevented from becoming hereafter hereditary to her progeny in the same evil, while by hanging it is not; but whether this opinion be erroneous or not,' the reporter adds, 'I am not to dispute.'

* * *

CHAPTER IX.

Glanvil's Sadducismus Triumphatus-His Sentiments on Witchcraft and Demonology-Baxter's 'Certainty of the World of Spirits,' &c.-Witch Trial at Bury St. Edmund's by Sir Matthew Hale, 1664-The Evidence adduced in Court-Two Witches hanged-Three hanged at Exeter in 1682-The last Witches judicially executed in England-Uniformity of the Evidence adduced at the Trials-Webster's Attack upon the Witch-Creed in 1677-Witch Trials in England at the end of the Seventeenth Century-French Parliaments vindicate the Diabolic Reality of the Crime-Witchcraft in Sweden.

The bold licentiousness and ill-concealed scepticism of Charles II. and his Court, whose despotic prejudices, however, supported by the zeal of the Church, prosecuted dissenters from a form of religion which maintained 'the right divine of kings to govern wrong,' might be indifferent to the prejudice of witchcraft. But the princes and despots of former times have seldom been more careful of the lives than they have been of the liberties, of their subjects. The formal apology for the reality of that crime published by Charles II.'s chaplain-in-ordinary, the Rev. Dr. Joseph Glanvil, against the modern Sadducees (a very inconsiderable sect) who denied both ghosts and witches, their well-attested apparitions and acts, has been already noticed. His philosophic inquiry (so he terms it) into the nature and operations of witchcraft (Sadducismus Triumphatus, Sadduceeism Vanquished, or 'Considerations about Witchcraft'), was occasioned by a case that came under the author's personal observation-the 'knockings' of the demon of Tedworth in the house of a Mr. Mompesson. The Tedworth demon must have been of that sort of active spirits which has been so obliging of late in enlightening the spiritual séances of our time.

Glanvil traces the steps by which a well-meaning student may unwarily be involved in diablerie. This philosophical inquirer observes:-'Those mystical students may, in their first address to the science [astrology], have no other design than the satisfaction of their curiosity to know remote and hidden things; yet that in the progress, being not satisfied within the bounds of their art, doth many times tempt the curious inquirer to use worse means of information; and no doubt those mischievous spirits, that are as vigilant as the beasts of prey, and watch all occasions to get us within their envious reach, are more constant attenders and careful spies upon the actions and inclinations of such whose genius and designs prepare them for their temptations. So that I look on judicial astrology as a fair introduction to sorcery and witchcraft; and who knows but it was first set on foot by the infernal hunters as a lure to draw the curiosos into those snares that lie hid beyond it. And yet I believe it may be innocently enough studied.... I believe there are very few among those who have been addicted to those strange arts of wonder and prediction, but have found themselves attacked by some unknown solicitors, and enticed by them to the more dangerous actions and correspondencies. For as there are a sort of base and sordid spirits that attend the envy and malice of the ignorant and viler sort of persons, and betray them into compacts by promises of revenge; so, no doubt, there are a kind of more airy and speculative fiends, of a higher rank and order than those wretched imps, who apply themselves to the curious.... Yea, and sometimes they are so cautious and wary in their conversations with more refined persons, that they never offer to make any express covenant with them. And to this purpose, I have been informed by a very reverend and learned doctor that one Mr. Edwards, a Master of Arts of Trinity College, in Cambridge, being reclaimed from conjuration, declared in his repentance that the demon always appeared to him like a man of good fashion, and never required any compact from him: and no doubt they sort themselves agreeably to the rate, post, and genius of those with whom they converse.'149

149 Sadducismus Triumphatus, section xvi.X

The sentiments of the royal chaplain on demonology are curious. 'Since good men,' he argues, 'in their state of separation are said to be ?σ?γγελοι, why the wicked may not be supposed to be ?σοδα?μονε? (in the worst sense of the word), I know nothing to help me to imagine. And if it be supposed that the imps of witches are sometimes wicked spirits of our own kind and nature, and possibly the same that have been witches and sorcerers in this life: this supposal may give a fairer and more probable account of many of the actions of sorcery and witchcraft than the other hypothesis, that they are always devils. And to this conjecture I will venture to subjoin another, which hath also its probability, viz. that it is not improbable but the familiars of witches are a vile kind of spirits of a very inferior constitution and nature; and none of those that were once of the highest hierarchy now degenerated into the spirits we call devils.... And that all the superior-yea, and inferior-regions have their several kinds of spirits, differing in their natural perfections as well as in the kinds and degrees of their depravities; which being supposed, 'tis very probable that those of the basest and meanest sorts are they who submit to the servilities.'150 It is a curious speculation how the old apologists of witchcraft would regard the modern 'curiosos'-the adventurous spirit-media of the present day, and whether the consulted spirits are of 'base and sordid rank,' or are 'a kind of airy and more speculative fiends.' It is fair to infer, perhaps, that they are of the latter class.

150 Sadducismus Triumphatus, Part I. sect. 4. Affixed to this work is a Collection of Relations of well-authenticated instances. Glanvil was one of the first Fellows of the recently established Royal Society. He is the author of a philosophical treatise of great merit-the Scepsis Scientifica-a review of which occupies several pages of The Introduction to the Literature of Europe, and which is favourably considered by Hallam. Not the least unaccountable fact in the history and literature of witchcraft is the absurd contradiction involved in the unbounded credulity of writers (who were sceptical on almost

The author of the 'Saints' Everlasting Rest,' the moderate and conscientious Baxter, was a contemporary of the Anglican divine. In another and later work this voluminous theological writer more fully developed his spiritualistic ideas. 'The Certainty of the World of Spirits fully evinced by unquestionable Histories of Apparitions, Witchcrafts, Operations, Voices, &c., proving the Immortality of Souls, the Malice and Misery of Devils and the Damned, and the Blessedness of the Justified. Written for the Conviction of Sadducees and Infidels,' was a formidable inscription which must have overawed, if it did not subdue, the infidelity of the modern Sadducees.151

151 It would not be an uninteresting, but it would be a melancholy, task to investigate the reasoning, or rather unreasoning, process which involved such honest men as Richard Baxter in a maze of credulity. While they rejected the principle of the ever-recurring ecclesiastical miracles of Catholicism (so sympathetic as well as useful to ardent faith), their devout imagination yet required the aid of a present supernaturalism to support their faith amidst the perplexing doubts and difficulties of ordinary life, and they gladly embraced the consoling belief that the present evils are the work of the enmity of the devil, whose temporary sovereignty, however, should be overthrown in the world to come, when the faith and constancy of his victims shall be eternally rewarded.

The sentence and execution of two old women at Bury St. Edmund's, in 1664, has been already noticed. This trial was carried on with circumstances of great solemnity and with all the external forms of justice-Sir Matthew Hale presiding as Lord Chief Baron: and the following is a portion of the evidence which was received two hundred years ago in an English Court of Justice and under the presidency of one of the greatest ornaments of the English Bench. One of the witnesses, a woman named Dorothy Durent, deposed that she had quarrelled with one Amy Duny, immediately after which her infant child was seized with fits. 'And the said examinant further stated that she being troubled at her child's distemper did go to a certain person named Doctor Job Jacob, who lived at Yarmouth, who had the reputation in the country to help children that were bewitched; who advised her to hang up the child's blanket in the chimney-corner all day, and at night when she put the child to bed to put it into the said blanket; and if she found anything in it she should not be afraid, but throw it into the fire. And this deponent did according to his direction; and at night when she took down the blanket with an intent to put the child therein, there fell out of the same a great toad which ran up and down the hearth; and she, having a young youth only with her in the house, desired him to catch the toad and throw it into the fire, which the youth did accordingly, and held it there with the tongs; and as soon as it was in the fire it made a great and terrible noise; and after a space there was a flashing in the fire like gunpowder, making a noise like the discharge of a pistol, and thereupon the toad was no more seen nor heard. It was asked by the Court if that, after the noise and flashing, there was not the substance of the toad to be seen to consume in the fire; and it was answered by the said Dorothy Durent that after the flashing and noise there was no more seen than if there had been none there. The next day there came a young woman, a kinswoman of the said Amy, and a neighbour of this deponent, and told this deponent that her aunt (meaning the said Amy) was in a most lamentable condition, having her face all scorched with fire, and that she was sitting alone in her house in her smock without any fire. And therefore this deponent went into the house of the said Amy Duny to see her, and found her in the same condition as was related to her; for her face, her legs, and thighs, which this deponent saw, seemed very much scorched and burnt with fire; at which this deponent seemed much to wonder, and asked how she came in that sad condition. And the said Amy replied that she might thank her for it, for that she (deponent) was the cause thereof; but she should live to see some of her children dead, and she upon crutches. And this deponent further saith, that after the burning of the said toad her child recovered and was well again, and was living at the time of the Assizes.' The accused were next arraigned for having bewitched the family of Mr. Samuel Pacy, merchant, of Lowestoft. The witch turned away from their door had at once inflicted summary vengeance by sending some fearful fits and pains in the stomach, apparently caused by an internal pricking of pins; the children shrieking out violently, vomiting nails, pins, and needles, and exclaiming against several women of ill-repute in the town; especially against two of them, Amy Duny and Rose Cullender.

A friend of the family appeared in court, and deposed: 'At some times the children would see things run up and down the house in the appearance of mice, and one of them suddenly snapt one with the tongs and threw it into the fire, and it screeched out like a bat. At another time the younger child, being out of her fits, went out of doors to take a little fresh air, and presently a little thing like a bee flew upon her face and would have gone into her mouth, whereupon the child ran in all haste to the door to get into the house again, shrieking out in a most terrible manner. Whereupon this deponent made haste to come to her; but before she could get to her the child fell into her swooning fit, and at last, with much pain and straining herself, she vomited up a twopenny nail with a broad head; and being demanded by this deponent how she came by this nail, she answered that the bee brought this nail and forced it into her mouth. And at other times the elder child declared unto this deponent that during the time of her fits she saw flies come unto her and bring with them in their mouths crooked pins; and after the child had thus declared the same she fell again into violent fits, and afterwards raised several pins. At another time the said elder child declared unto this deponent, and sitting by the fire suddenly started up and said she saw a mouse; and she crept under the table, looking after it; and at length she put something in her apron, saying she had caught it. And immediately she ran to the fire and threw it in; and there did appear upon it to this deponent like the flashing of gunpowder, though she confessed she saw nothing in the child's hands.' Another witness was the mother of a servant girl, Susanna Chandler, whose depositions are of much the same kind, but with the addition that her daughter was sometimes stricken with blindness and dumbness by demoniacal contrivance at the moment when her testimony was required in court. 'Being brought into court at the trial, she suddenly fell into her fits, and being carried out of the court again, within the space of half an hour she came to herself and recovered her speech; and thereupon was immediately brought into the court, and asked by the Court whether she was in condition to take an oath and to give evidence. She said she could. But when she was sworn and asked what she could say against either of the prisoners, before she could make any answer she fell into her fits, shrieking out in a miserable manner, crying "Burn her! burn her!" which was all the words she could speak.' Doubts having been hazarded by one or two of the less credulous of the origin of the fits and contortions, 'to avoid this scruple, it was privately desired by the judge that the Lord Cornwallis, Sir Edmund Bacon, and Mr. Serjeant Keeling and some other gentlemen there in court, would attend one of the distempered persons in the farthest part of the hall whilst she was in her fits, and then to send for one of the witches to try what would then happen, which they did accordingly.' Some of the possessed, having been put to the proof by having their eyes covered, and being touched upon the hand by one of those present, fell into contortions as if they had been touched by the witches.

The suspicion of imposture thus raised was quickly silenced by fresh proof. Robert Sherringham, farmer, deposed that 'about two years since, passing along the street with his cart and horses, the axle-tree of his cart touched her house and broke down some part of it; at which she was very much displeased, threatening him that his horses should suffer for it. And so it happened; for all those horses, being four in number, died within a short time after. Since that time he hath had great losses by sudden dying of his other cattle. So soon as his sows pigged, the pigs would leap and caper, and immediately fall down and die. Also, not long after, he was taken with a lameness in his limbs that he could neither go nor stand for some days.'152

152 This witness finished his evidence by informing the Court that 'after all this, he was very much vexed with a great number of lice, of extraordinary bigness; and although he many times shifted himself, yet he was not anything the better, but would swarm again with them. So that in the conclusion he was forced to burn all his clothes, being two suits of apparel, and then was clear from them.'-Narratives of Sorcery, &c., from the most authentic sources, by Thomas Wright.

The extreme ridiculousness, even more than the iniquity, of the accusations may be deemed the principal characteristic of such procedures: these childish indictments were received with eagerness by prosecutors, jury, and judge. After half an hour's deliberation the jury returned a unanimous verdict against the prisoners, who were hanged, protesting their innocence to the end. The year before, a woman named Julian Coxe was hanged at Taunton on the evidence of a hunter that a hare, which had taken refuge from his pursuit in a bush, was found on the opposite side in the likeness of a witch, who had assumed the form of the animal, and taken the opportunity of her hiding-place to resume her proper shape. In 1682 three women were executed at Exeter. Their witchcraft was of the same sort as that of the Bury witches. Little variety indeed appears in the English witchcraft as brought before the courts of law. They chiefly consist in hysterical, epileptic, or other fits, accompanied by vomiting of various witch-instruments of torture. The Exeter witches are memorable as the last executed judicially in England.

Attacks upon the superstition of varying degrees of merit were not wanting during any period of the seventeenth century. Webster, who, differing in this respect from most of his predecessors, declared his opinion that the whole of witchcraft was founded on natural phenomena, credulity, torture, imposture, or delusion, has deserved to be especially commemorated among the advocates of common sense. He had been well acquainted in his youth with the celebrated Lancashire Witches' case, and enjoyed good opportunities of studying the absurd obscenities of the numerous examinations. His meritorious work was given to the world in 1677, under the title of 'The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft.' Towards the close of the century witch-trials still occur; but the courts of justice were at length freed from the reproach of legal murders.

The great revolution of 1688, which set the principles of Protestantism on a firmer basis, could not fail to effect an intellectual as well as a political change. A recognition of the claims of common sense (at least on the subject of diabolism) seemed to begin from that time; and in 1691, when some of the criminals were put upon their trial at Frome, in Somersetshire, they were acquitted, not without difficulty, by the exertion of the better reason of the presiding judge, Lord Chief Justice Holt. Fortunately for the accused, Lord Chief Justice Holt was a person of sense, as well as legal acuteness; for he sat as judge at a great number of the trials in different parts of the kingdom. Both prosecutors and juries were found who would willingly have sent the proscribed convicts to death. But the age was arrived when at last it was to be discovered that fire and torture can extinguish neither witchcraft nor any other heresy; and the princes and parliaments of Europe seemed to begin to recognise in part the philosophical maxim that, 'heresy and witchcraft are two crimes which commonly increase by punishment, and are never so effectually suppressed as by being totally neglected.'

In France, until about the year 1670, there was little abatement in the fury or number of the prosecutions. In that year several women had been sentenced to death for frequenting the Domdaniel or Sabbath meeting by the provincial parliament of Normandy. Louis XIV. was induced to commute the sentence into banishment for life. The parliament remonstrated at so astonishing an interference with the due course of justice, and presented a petition to the king in which they insist upon the dread reality of a crime that 'tends to the destruction of religion and the ruin of nations.'153

153 'Your parliament,' protest these legislators, 'have thought it their duty on occasion of these crimes, the greatest which men can commit, to make you acquainted with the general and uniform feelings of the people of this province with regard to them; it being moreover a question in which are concerned the glory of God and the relief of your suffering subjects, who groan under their fears from the threats and menaces of this sort of persons, and who feel the effects of them every day in the mortal and extraordinary maladies which attack them, and the surprising damage and loss of their possessions.' They then review the various laws and decrees of Church and State from the earliest times in support of their convictions: they cite the authority of the Church in council and in its most famous individual teachers. Particularly do they insist upon the opinions of St. Augustin, in his City of God, as irrefragable. 'After so many authorities and punishments ordained by human and divine laws, we humbly supplicate your Majesty to reflect once more upon the extraordinary results which proceed from the malevolence of this sort of people; on the deaths from unknown diseases which are often the consequence of their menaces; on the loss of the goods and chattels of your subjects; on the proofs of guilt continually afforded by the insensibility of the marks upon the accused; on the sudden transportation of bodies from one place to another; on the sacrifices and nocturnal assemblies, and other facts, corroborated by the testimony of ancient and modern authors, and verified by so many eyewitnesses, composed partly of accomplices and partly of people who had no interest in the trials beyond the love of truth, and confirmed moreover by the confessions of the accused parties themselves, and that, Sire, with so much agreement and conformity between the different cases, that the most ignorant persons convicted of this crime have spoken to the same circumstances and in nearly the same words as the most celebrated authors who have written about it; all of which may be easily proved to your Majesty's satisfaction by the records of various trials before your parliaments.'-Given in Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions. Louis XIV., with an unaccustomed care for human life, resisting these forcible arguments, remained firm, and the condemned were saved from the stake.

While most of the Governments of Europe were now content to leave sorcerers and witches to the irregular persecutions of the people, tacitly abandoning to the mob the right of proceeding against them as they pleased, without the interference of the law, in a remote kingdom of Europe a witch-persecution commenced with the ordinary fury, under express sanction of the Government. It is curious that at the last moments of its existence as a legal crime, one of the last fires of witchcraft should have been lighted in Sweden, a country which, remote from continental Europe, seems to have been up to that period exempt from the judicial excesses of England, France, or Germany. The story of the Mohra witches is inserted in an appendix to Glanvil's 'Collection of Relations,' by Dr. Anthony Horneck. The epidemic broke out in 1669, in the village of Mohra, in the mountainous districts of Central Sweden. A number of children became affected with an imaginative or mischievous disease, which carried them off to a place called Blockula, where they held communion and festival with the devil. These, numbering a large proportion of the youth of the neighbourhood, were incited, it seems, by the imposture or credulity of the ministers of Mohra and Elfdale, to report the various transactions at their spiritual séances. To such a height increased the terrified excitement of the people, that a commission was appointed by the king, consisting of both clergy and laity, to enquire into the origin and circumstances of the matter. It commenced proceedings in August 1670. Days for humiliation and prayer were ordered, and a solemn service inaugurated the judicial examinations. Agreeably to the dogma of the most approved foreign authorities, which allowed the evidence of the greatest criminals and of the youngest age, the commission began by examining the children, three hundred in number, claiming to be bewitched, confronting them with the witches who had, according to the indictment, been the means of the devil's seduction. They were strictly interrogated whether they were certain of the fact of having been actually carried away by the devil in his proper person. Being answered in the affirmative, the royal commissioners proceeded to demand of the accused themselves, 'Whether the confessions of those children were true, and admonished them to confess the truth, that they might turn away from the devil unto the living God. At first most of them did very stiffly, and without shedding the least tear, deny it, though much against their will and inclination. After this the children were examined every one by themselves, to see whether their confessions did agree or no; and the commissioners found that all of them, except some very little ones, which could not tell all the circumstances, did punctually agree in their confessions of particulars. In the meanwhile, the commissioners that were of the clergy examined the witches, but could not bring them to any confession, all continuing steadfast in their denials, till at last some of them burst out into tears, and their confession agreed with what the children said; and these expressed their abhorrence of the fact, and begged pardon, adding that the devil, whom they called Locyta, had stopped the mouths of some of them, so loath was he to part with his prey, and had stopped the ears of others. And being now gone from them, they could no longer conceal it, for they had now perceived his treachery.' The Elfdale witches were induced to announce-'We of the province of Elfdale do confess that we used to go to a gravel-pit which lies hard by a cross-way, and there we put on a vest over our heads, and then danced round; and after this ran to the cross-way and called the devil thrice, first with a still voice, the second time somewhat louder, and the third time very loud, with these words, "Antecessor, come and carry us to Blockula." Whereupon immediately he used to appear, but in different habits; but for the most part we saw him in a grey coat and red and blue stockings.154 He had a red beard, a high-crowned hat with linen of divers colours wrapt about it, and long garters about upon his stockings. Then he asked us whether we would serve him with soul and body. If we were content to do so, he set us on a beast which he had there ready, and carried us over churches and high walls, and after all he came to a green meadow where Blockula lies [the Brockenberg in the Hartz forest, as Scott conjectures]. We procured some scrapings of altars and filings of church clocks, and then he gave us a horn with a salve in it, wherewith we do anoint ourselves, and a saddle, with a hammer and a wooden nail thereby to fix the saddle. Whereupon we call upon the devil, and away we go.'

154 Accommodating himself to modern refinement, the devil usually discards the antiquated horns, hoofs, and tail; and if, as Dr. Mede supposed, 'appearing in human shape, he has always a deformity of some uncouth member or other,' such inconvenient appendages are disguised as much as possible. As Goethe's Mephistopheles explains to his witch:

'Culture, which renders man less like an ape,

Has also licked the devil into shape.'

Many interrogatories were put. Amongst others, how it was contrived that they could pass up and down chimneys and through unbroken panes of glass (to which it was replied that the devil removes all obstacles); how they were enabled to transport so many children at one time? &c. They acknowledged that 'till of late they had never power to carry away children; but only this year and the last: and the devil did at that time force them to it: that heretofore it was sufficient to carry but one of their own children or a stranger's child with them, which happened seldom: but now he did plague them and whip them if they did not procure him many children, insomuch that they had no peace or quiet for him. And whereas that formerly one journey a week would serve their turn from their own town to the place aforesaid, now they were forced to run to other towns and places for children, and that they brought with them some fifteen, some sixteen children every night.' As to their means of conveyance, they were sometimes men; at other times, beasts, spits, and posts: but a preferable mode was the riding upon goats, whose backs were made more commodious by the use of a magical ointment whenever a larger freight than usual was to be transported. Arrived at Blockula, their diabolical initiation commenced. First they were made to deny their baptism and take an oath of fealty to their new master, to whom they devoted soul and body to serve faithfully. Their new baptism was a baptism of blood: for their lord cut their fingers and wrote their names in blood in his book. After other ceremonies they sit down to a table, and are regaled with not the choicest viands (for such an occasion and from such a host)-broth, bacon, cheese, oatmeal. Dancing and fighting (the latter a peculiarity of the Northern Sabbath) ensue alternately. They indulge, too, in the debauchery of the South: the witches having offspring from their intercourse with the demons, who intermarry and produce a mongrel breed of toads and serpents. As interludes, it may be supposed, to the serious part of the entertainment the fiend would contrive various jokes, affecting to be dead; and, a graver joke, he would bid them to erect a huge building of stone, in which they were to be saved upon the approaching day of judgment. While engaged at this work he threw down the unfinished house about their ears, to the consternation, and sometimes injury, of his vassals.155 Some of the witnesses spoke of a great dragon encircled with flames, and an iron chair; of a vision of a burning pit. The minister of the district gave his evidence that, having been suffering from a painful headache, he could account for the unusual severity of the attack only by supposing that the witches had celebrated one of their infernal dances upon his head while asleep in bed: and one of them, in accordance with this conjecture, acknowledged that the devil had sent her with a sledge-hammer to drive a nail into the temples of the obnoxious clergyman. The solidity of his skull saved him; and the only result was, as stated, a severe pain in his head.

155 Le Sage's Diable Boiteux, who so obligingly introduces the Spanish student to the secret realities of human life, is, it may be observed, of both a more rational and more instructive temperament than the ordinary demons who appear at the witches' revels to practise their senseless and fantastic rites.

All the persuasive arguments of the examiners could not induce the witches to repeat before them their well-known tricks: because, as they affirmed, 'since they had confessed all they found all their witchcraft was gone: and the devil at this time appeared very terrible with claws on his hands and feet, with horns on his head and a long tail behind, and showed them a pit burning with a hand out; but the devil did thrust the person down again with an iron fork, and suggested to the witches that if they continued in their confession he would deal with them in the same manner.' These are some of the interesting particulars of this judicial commission as reported by contemporaries. Seventy persons were condemned to death. One woman pleaded (a frequent plea) in arrest of judgment that she was with child; the rest perseveringly denying their guilt. Twenty-three were burned in a single fire at the village of Mohra. Fifteen children were also executed; while fifty-six others, convicted of witchcraft in a minor degree, were sentenced to various punishments: to be scourged on every Sunday during a whole year being a sentence of less severity. The proceedings were brought to an end, it seems, by the fear of the upper classes for their own safety. An edict of the king who had authorised the enquiry now ordered it to be terminated, and the history of the commission was attempted to be involved in silent obscurity. Prayers were ordered in all the churches throughout Sweden for deliverance from the malice of Satan, who was believed to be let loose for the punishment of the land.156 It is remarkable that the incidents of the Swedish trials are chiefly reproductions of the evidence extracted in the courts of France and Germany.

156 Narratives of Sorcery, &c., by Thomas Wright, who quotes the authorised reports. Sir Walter Scott refers to 'An account of what happened in the kingdom of Sweden in the years 1669, 1670, and afterwards translated out of High Dutch into English by Dr. Anthony Horneck, attached to Glanvil's Sadducismus Triumphatus. The translation refers to the evidence of Baron Sparr, ambassador from the court of Sweden to the court of England in 1672, and that of Baron Lyonberg, envoy-extraordinary of the same power, both of whom attest the confessions and execution of the witches. The King of Sweden himself answered the express inquiries of the Duke of Holstein with marked reserve. "His judges and commissioners," he said, "had caused divers men, women, and children to be burnt and executed on such pregnant evidence as was brought before them; but whether the actions confessed and proved against them were real, or only the effect of a strong imagination, he was not as yet able to determine."'

* * *

CHAPTER X.

Witchcraft in the English Colonies in North America-Puritan Intolerance and Superstition-Cotton Mather's 'Late Memorable Providences'-Demoniacal Possession-Evidence given before the Commission-Apologies issued by Authority-Sudden Termination of the Proceedings-Reactionary Feeling against the Agitators-The Salem Witchcraft the last Instance of Judicial Prosecution on a large Scale in Christendom-Philosophers begin to expose the Superstition-Meritorious Labours of Webster, Becker, and others-Their Arguments could reach only the Educated and Wealthy Classes of Society-These only partially Enfranchised-The Superstition continues to prevail among the Vulgar-Repeal of the Witch Act in England in 1736-Judicial and Popular Persecutions in England in the Eighteenth Century-Trial of Jane Wenham in England in 1712-Maria Renata burned in Germany in 1749-La Cadière in France-Last Witch burned in Scotland in 1722-Recent Cases of Witchcraft-Protestant Superstition-Witchcraft in the Extra-Christian World.

A review of the superstitions of witchcraft would be incomplete without some notice of the Salem witches in New England. An equally melancholy and mischievous access of fanatic credulity, during the years 1688-1692, overwhelmed the colony of Massachusetts with a multitude of demons and their human accomplices; and the circumstances of the period were favourable to the vigour of the delusion. In the beginning of their colonisation the New Englanders were generally a united community; they were little disturbed by heresy; and if they had been thus infected they were too busily engaged in contending against the difficulties and dangers of a perilous position to be able to give much attention to differences in religious belief. But soon the purity of their faith was in danger of being corrupted by heretical immigrants. The Puritans were the most numerous and powerful of the fugitives from political and religious tyranny in England, and the dominant sect in North America almost as severely oppressed Anabaptists and Quakers in the colonies as they themselves, religious exiles from ecclesiastical despotism, had suffered in the old world. They proved themselves worthy followers of the persecutors of Servetus. Other enemies from without also were active in seeking the destruction of the true believers. Fierce wars and struggles were continuously being waged with the surrounding savages, who regarded the increasing prosperity and number of the intruders with just fear and resentment.

Imbued as the colonists were with demoniacal prepossessions, it is not so surprising that they deemed their rising State beset by spiritual enemies; and it is fortunate, perhaps, that the wilds of North America were not still more productive of fiends and witches, and more destructive massacres than that of 1690-92 did not disgrace their colonial history. From the pen of Dr. Cotton Mather, Fellow of Harvard College, and his father (who was the Principal), we have received the facts of the history. These two divines and their opinions obtained great respect throughout the colony. They devoutly received the orthodox creed as expounded in the writings of the ancient authorities on demonology, firmly convinced of the reality of the present wanderings of Satan 'up and down' in the earth; and Dr. Cotton Mather was at the same time the chief supporter and the historian of the demoniacal war now commenced. It was significantly initiated by the execution of a papist, an Irishman named Glover, who was accused of having bewitched the daughters of a mason of Boston, by name Goodwin. These girls, of infantile age, suffered from convulsive fits, the ordinary symptom of 'possession.' Mather received one of them into his house for the purpose of making experiments, and, if possible, to exorcise the evil spirits. She would suddenly, in presence of a number of spectators, fall into a trance, rise up, place herself in a riding attitude as if setting out for the Sabbath, and hold conversation with invisible beings. A peculiar phase of this patient's case was that when under the influence of 'hellish charms' she took great pleasure in reading or hearing 'bad' books, which she was permitted to do with perfect freedom. Those books included the Prayer Book of the English Episcopal Church, Quakers' writings, and popish productions. Whenever the Bible was taken up, the devil threw her into the most fearful convulsions.

As a result of this diagnosis appeared the publication of 'Late Memorable Providences relating to Witchcraft and Possession,' which, together with Baxter's 'Certainty of the World of Spirits,' a work Mather was careful to distribute and recommend to the people, increased the fever of fear and fanaticism to the highest pitch. The above incidents were the prelude only to the proper drama of the Salem witches. In 1692, two girls, the daughter and niece of Mr. Parvis, minister, suffering from a disease similar to that of the Goodwins, were pronounced to be preternaturally afflicted. Two miserable Indians, man and wife, servants in the family, who indiscreetly attempted to cure the witch-patients by means of some charm or drug, were suspected themselves as the guilty agents, and sent to execution. The physicians, who seem to have been entirely ignorant of the origin of these attacks, and as credulous as the unprofessional world, added fresh testimony to the reality of 'possession.'157 At first, persons of the lower classes and those who, on account of their ill-repute, would be easily recognised to be diabolic agents, were alone incriminated. But as the excitement increased others of higher rank were pointed out. A black man was introduced on the stage in the form of an Indian of terrible aspect and portentous dimensions, who had threatened the christianising colonists with extermination for intruding their faith upon the reluctant heathen. In May 1692, a new governor, Sir William Phipps, arrived with a new charter (the old one had been suspended) from England; this official, far from discouraging the existing prejudices, urged the local authorities on to greater extravagance. The examinations were conducted in the ordinary and most approved manner, the Lord's Prayer and the secret marks being the infallible tests. Towards the end of May two women, Bridget Bishop and Susannah Martin, were hanged.

157 A phenomenon of apparently the same sort as that which was of such frequent occurrence in the Middle Age and in the seventeenth century, is said to have been lately occupying considerable attention in the South of France. The Courrier des Alpes narrates an extraordinary scene in one of the churches in the Commune of Morzine, among the women, on occasion of the visitation of the bishop of the district. It seems that the malady in question attacks, for the most part, the female population, and the patients are confidently styled, and asserted to be, possessed. It 'produces all the effects of madness, without having its character,' and is said to baffle all the resources of medical science, which is ignorant of its nature. There had been an intermission of the convulsions for some time, but they have now reappeared with greater violence than ever.-The Times newspaper, June 6, 1864.

On June 2, a formal commission sat, before which the most ridiculous evidence was gravely given and as gravely received. John Louder deposed against Bridget Bishop, 'that upon some little controversy with Bishop about her fowls going well to bed, he did awake in the night by moonlight, and did see clearly the likeness of this woman grievously oppressing him, in which miserable condition she held him unable to help himself till next day. He told Bishop of this, but she denied it, and threatened him very much. Quickly after this, being at home on a Lord's day with the doors shut about him, he saw a black pig approach him, at which he going to kick, it vanished away. Immediately after sitting down he saw a black thing jump in at the window and come and stand before him. The body was like that of a monkey, the feet like a cock's, but the face much like that of a man.158 He being so extremely affrighted that he could not speak, this monster spoke to him and said, "I am a messenger sent unto you, for I understand that you are in some trouble of mind, and if you will be ruled by me you shall want for nothing in this world." Whereupon he endeavoured to clap his hands upon it, but he could feel no substance; and it jumped out of window again, but immediately came in by the porch (though the doors were shut) and said, "You had better take my counsel." He then struck at it with a stick, and struck only the ground and broke the stick. The arm with which he struck was presently disabled, and it vanished away. He presently went out at the back door, and spied this Bishop in her orchard going towards her house, but he had no power to set one foot forward to her; whereupon, returning into the house, he was immediately accosted by the monster he had seen before, which goblin was now going to fly at him; whereat he cried out, "The whole armour of God be between me and you!" so it sprung back and flew over the apple-tree, shaking many apples off the tree in its flying over. At its leap, it flung dirt with its feet against the stomach of the man, whereupon he was then struck dumb, and so continued for three days together.' Another witness declared in court; that, 'being in bed on the Lord's day, at night he heard a scrambling at the window; whereat he then saw Susanna Martin come in and jump down upon the floor. She took hold of this deponent's foot, and, drawing his body into a heap, she lay upon him nearly two hours, in all which time he could neither speak nor stir. At length, when he could begin to move, he laid hold on her hand, and, pulling it up to his mouth, he bit some of her fingers, as he judged into the bone; whereupon she went from the chamber down stairs out at the door,' &c.

158 'Rara avis in terris.' A mongrel and anomalous species like the German Meerkatzen-monkey-cats.

On July 19 five women, and on August 19, six persons, were sent to the gallows, among whom was Mr. George Burroughs, minister, who had provoked his judges by questioning the very existence of witchcraft. At the last moments he so favourably impressed the assembled spectators by an eloquent address, that Dr. Mather, who was present, found it necessary to prevent the progress of a reactionary feeling by asserting that the criminal was no regularly ordained minister, and the devil has often been transformed into an angel of light. So transparently iniquitous and absurd had their mode of procedure become, that one of the subordinates in the service of the authorities, whose office it was to arrest the accused, refused to perform any longer his hateful office, and being himself denounced as an accomplice, he sought safety in flight. He was captured and executed as a recusant and wizard. Eight sorcerers suffered the extreme penalty of the law on September 22. Giles Gory, a few days before, indignantly refusing to plead, was 'pressed to death,' an accustomed mode of punishing obstinate prisoners; and in the course of this torture, it is said, when the tongue of the victim was forced from his mouth in the agony of pain, the presiding sheriff forced it back with his cane with much sang froid. At this stage in the proceedings, the magistrates considered that a justificatory memoir ought to be published for the destruction of twenty persons of both sexes, and, at the express desire of the governor, Cotton Mather drew up an Apology in the form of a treatise, 'More Wonders of the Invisible World,' in which the Salem, executions are justified by the precedent of similar and notorious instances in the mother-country, as well as by the universally accepted doctrines of various eminent authors of all ages and countries. Increase Mather, Principal of Harvard College, was also directed to solve the question whether the devil could sometimes assume the shape of a saint to effect his particular design. The reverend author resolved it affirmatively in a learned treatise, which he called (a seeming plagiarism) 'Cases of Conscience concerning Witchcraft and Evil Spirits personating Men,' an undertaking prompted by an unforeseen and disagreeable circumstance. The wife of a minister, one of the most active promoters of the prosecution, was involved in the indiscriminate charges of the informers, who were beginning to aim at more exalted prey. The minister, alarmed at the unexpected result of his own agitation, was now convinced of the falseness of the whole proceeding. It was a fortunate occurrence. From that time the executions ceased.159

159 If, however, individuals of the human species were at length exempt from the penalty of death, those of the canine species were sacrificed, perhaps vicariously. Two dogs, convicted, as it is reported, of being accessories, were solemnly hanged!

The dangerously increasing class of informers who, like the 'delatores' of the early Roman Empire, made a lucrative profession by their baseness, and spared not even reluctant or recusant magistrates themselves, more than anything else, was the cause of the termination of the trials. If they would preserve their own lives, or at least their reputations, the authorities and judges found it was necessary at once to check the progress of the infection. About one hundred and fifty witches or wizards were still under arrest (two hundred more being about to be arrested), when Governor Phipps having been recalled by the Home Government, was induced by a feeling of interest or justice to release the prisoners, to the wonder and horror of the people. From this period a reaction commenced. Those who four years before originated the trials suddenly became objects of hatred or contempt. Even the clergy, who had taken a leading part in them, became unpopular. In spite of the strenuous attempts of Dr. Cotton Mather and his disciples to revive the agitation, the tide of public opinion or feeling had set the other way, and people began to acknowledge the insufficiency of the evidence and the possible innocence of the condemned. Public fasts and prayers were decreed throughout the colony. Judges and juries emulated one another in admitting a misgiving 'that we were sadly deluded and mistaken.' Dr. Mather was less fickle and less repentant. In one of his treatises on the subject, recounting some of the signs and proofs of the actual crime, he declares: 'Nor are these the tenth part of the prodigies that fell out among the inhabitants of New England. Fleshy people may burlesque these things: but when hundreds of the most solemn people, in a country where they have as much mother-wit certainly as the rest of mankind, know them to be true, nothing but the froward spirit of Sadduceeism can question them. I have not yet (he confidently asserts) mentioned so much as one thing that will not be justified, if it be required, by the oaths of more considerate persons than any that can ridicule these odd phenomena.'160

160 Narratives of Sorcery and Magic, chap. xxxi. The faith of the Fellow of Harvard College, we may be inclined to suppose, was quickened in proportion to his doubts. To do him justice, he admitted that some of the circumstances alleged might be exaggerated or even imaginary.

So ended the last of public and judicial persecutions of considerable extent for witchcraft in Christendom. As far as the superior intellects were concerned, philosophy could now dare to reaffirm that reason 'must be our last judge and guide in everything.' Yet Folly, like Dulness, 'born a goddess, never dies;' and many of the higher classes must have experienced some silent regrets for an exploded creed which held the reality of the constant personal interference of the demons in human affairs. The fact that the great body of the people of every country in Europe remained almost as firm believers as their ancestors down to the present age, hardly needs to be insisted on; that theirs was a living faith is evidenced in the ever-recurring popular outbreaks of superstitious ignorance, resulting both in this country and on the Continent often in the deaths of the objects of their diabolic fear.

Such arguments as those of Webster in England, of Becker and Thomasius in Germany, on the special subject of witchcraft, and the general arguments of Locke or of Bayle, could be addressed only to the few.161 Nor indeed would it be philosophical to expect that the vulgar should be able to penetrate an inveterate superstition that recently had been universally credited by the learned world.

161 Dr. Balthazar Becker, theological professor at Amsterdam, published his heretical work in Dutch, under the title of 'The World Bewitched, or a Critical Investigation of the commonly-received Opinion respecting Spirits, their Nature, Power, and Acts, and all those extraordinary Feats which Men are said to perform through their Aid;' 1691. 'He founds his arguments on two grand principles-that from their very nature spirits cannot act upon material beings, and that the Scriptures represent the devil and his satellites as shut up in the prison of hell. To explain away the texts which militate against his system, evidently cost him much labour and perplexity. His interpretations, for the most part, are similar to those still relied on by the believers in his doctrine' (Note by Murdock in Mosheim's Institutes of Ecclesiastical History). The usually candid Mosheim notices, apparently with contempt, '"The World Bewitched," a prolix and copious work, in which he perverts and explains away, with no little ingenuity indeed, but with no less audacity, whatever the sacred volume relates of persons possessed by evil spirits, and of the power of demons, and maintains that the miserable being whom the sacred writers call Satan and the devil, together with his ministers, is bound with everlasting chains in hell, so that he cannot thence go forth to terrify mortals and to plot against the righteous.' Balthazar Becker, one of the most meritorious of the opponents of diabolism, was deposed from his ministerial office by an ecclesiastical synod, and denounced as an atheist. His position, and the boldness of his arguments, excited extraordinary attention and animosity, and 'vast numbers' of Lutheran divines arose to confute his atheistical heresy. The impunity which he enjoyed from the vengeance of the devil (he had boldly challenged the deity of hell to avenge his overturned altars) was explained by the orthodox divines to be owing to the superior cunning of Satan, who was certain that he would be in the end the greatest gainer by unbelief. Christ. Thomasius, professor of jurisprudence, was the author of several works against the popular prejudice between the years 1701 and 1720. He is considered by Ennemoser to have been able to effect more from his professional position than the humanely-minded Becker. But, after all, the overthrow of the diabolic altars was caused much more by the discoveries of science than by all the writings of literary philosophers. Even in Southern Europe and in Spain (as far as was possible in that intolerant land) reason began to exhibit some faint signs of existence; and Benito Feyjoó, whose Addisonian labours in the eighteenth century in the land of the Inquisition deserve the gratitude of his countrymen (in his Téatro Critico), dared to raise his voice, however feeble, in its behalf.

The cessation of legal procedure against witches was negative rather than positive: the enactments in the statute-books were left unrepealed, and so seemed not to altogether discountenance a still somewhat doubtful prejudice. It was so late as in the ninth year of the reign of George II., 1736, that the Witch Act of 1604 was formally and finally repealed. By a tardy exertion of sense and justice the Legislature then enacted that, for the future, no prosecutions should be instituted on account of witchcraft, sorcery, conjuration, enchantment, &c., against any person or persons. Unfortunately for the credit of civilisation, it would be easy to enumerate a long list of illegal murders both before and since 1736. One or two of the most remarkable cases plainly evincing, as Scott thinks, that the witch-creed 'is only asleep, and might in remote corners be again awakened to deeds of blood,' are too significant not to be briefly referred to. In 1712 Jane Wenham, a poor woman belonging to the village of Walkern, in the county of Hertford, was solemnly found guilty by the jury on the evidence of sixteen witnesses, of whom three were clergymen; Judge Powell presiding. She was condemned to death as a witch in the usual manner; but was reprieved on the representation of the judge. She had been commonly known in the neighbourhood of her home as a malicious witch, who took great pleasure in afflicting farmers' cattle and in effecting similar mischief. The incumbent of Walkern, the Rev. Mr. Gardiner, fully shared the prejudice of his parishioners; and, far from attempting to dispel, he entirely concurred with, their suspicions. A warrant was obtained from the magistrate, Sir Henry Chauncy, for the arrest of the accused: and she was brought before that local official; depositions were taken, and she was searched for 'marks.' The vicar of Ardley, a neighbouring village, tested her guilt or innocence with the Lord's Prayer, which was repeated incorrectly: by threats and other means he forced the confession that she was indeed an agent of the devil, and had had intercourse with him.

But, even in the middle of the eighteenth century, witches were occasionally tried and condemned by judicial tribunals. In the year 1749, Maria or Emma Renata, a nun in the convent of Unterzell, near Würzburg, was condemned by the spiritual, and executed by the civil, power. By the clemency of the prince, the proper death by burning alive was remitted to the milder sentence of beheading, and afterwards burning the corpse to ashes: for no vestige of such an accursed criminal should be permitted to remain after death. When a young girl Maria Renata had been seduced to witchcraft by a military officer, and was accustomed to attend the witch-assemblies. In the convent she practised her infernal arts in bewitching her sister-nuns.162 About the same time a nun in the south of France was subjected to the barbarous imputation and treatment of a witch: Father Girard, discovering that his mistress had some extraordinary scrofulous marks, conceived the idea of proclaiming to the world that she was possessed of the stigmata-impressions of the marks of the nails and spear on the crucified Lord, believed to be reproduced on the persons of those who, like the celebrated St. Francis, most nearly assimilated their lives to His. The Jesuits eagerly embraced an opportunity of producing a miracle which might confound their Jansenist rivals, whose sensational miracles were threatening to eclipse their own.163 Sir Walter Scott states that the last judicial sentence of death for witchcraft in Scotland was executed in 1722, when Captain David Ross, sheriff of Sutherland, condemned a woman to the stake. As for illegal persecution, M. Garinet ('Histoire de la Magie en France') gives a list of upwards of twenty instances occurring in France between the years 1805 and 1818. In the latter year three tribunals were occupied with the trials of the murderers.

162 Ennemoser relates the history of this witch from 'The Christian address at the burning of Maria Renata, of the convent of Unterzell, who was burnt on June 21, 1749, which address was delivered to a numerous multitude, and afterwards printed by command of the authorities.' The preacher earnestly insisted upon the divine sanction and obligation of the Mosaic law, 'Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,' which was taken as the text; and upon the fact that, so far from being abolished by Christianity, it was made more imperative by the Christian Church.

163 The victim of the pleasure, and afterwards of the ambition, of Father Girard, is known as La Cadière. She was a native of Toulon, and when young had witnessed the destructive effects of the plague which devastated that city in 1720. Amidst the confusion of society she was distinguished by her purity and benevolence. The story of La Cadière and Father Girard is eloquently narrated by M. Michelet in La Sorcière. The convulsions of the Flagellants of the thirteenth century, and of the Protestant Revivalists of the present day, exhibit on a large scale the paroxysms of the French convents and the Dutch orphan-houses of the seventeenth century. Nor is diabolical 'possession' yet extinct in Christendom, if the reports received from time to time from the Continent are to be credited. Recently, a convent of Augustinian nuns at Loretto, on the authority of the Corriere delle Marche of Ancona, was attacked in a similar way to that of Loudun. A vomiting of needles and pins, the old diabolical torture, and a strict examination of the accused, followed.

If a belief should be entertained that the now 'vulgar' ideas of witchcraft have been long obsolete in England, it would be destroyed by a perusal of a few of the newspapers and periodicals of the last hundred years; and a sufficiently voluminous work might be occupied with the achievements of modern Sidrophels, and the records of murders or mutilations perpetrated by an ignorant mob.164

164 Without noticing other equally notorious instances of recent years, it may be enough (to dispel any such possible illusion) to transcribe a paragraph from an account in The Times newspaper of Sept. 24, 1863. 'It is a somewhat singular fact,' says the writer, describing a late notorious witch-persecution in the county of Essex, 'that nearly all the sixty or seventy persons concerned in the outrage which resulted in the death of the deceased were of the small tradesmen class, and that none of the agricultural labourers were mixed up in the affair. It is also stated that none of those engaged were in any way under the influence of liquor. The whole disgraceful transaction arose out of a deep belief in witchcraft, which possesses to a lamentable extent the tradespeople and the lower orders of the district.' Nor does it appear that the village of Hedingham (the scene of the witch-murder) claims a superiority in credulity over other villages in Essex or in England. The instigator and chief agent in the Hedingham case was the wife of an innkeeper, who was convinced that she had been bewitched by an old wizard of reputation in the neighbourhood: and the mode of punishment was the popular one of drowning or suffocating in the nearest pond. Scraps of written papers found in the hovel of the murdered wizard revealed the numerous applications by lovers, wives, and other anxious inquirers. Amongst other recent revivals of the 'Black Art' in Southern Europe already referred to, the inquisition at Rome upon a well-known English or American 'spiritualist,' when, as we learn from himself, he was compelled to make a solemn abjuration that he had not surrendered his soul to the devil, is significant.

Nor would it be safe to assume, with some writers, that diabolism, as a vulgar prejudice, is now entirely extirpated from Protestant Christendom, and survives only in the most orthodox countries of Catholicism or in the remoter parts of northern or eastern Europe. Superstition, however mitigated, exists even in the freer Protestant lands of Europe and America; and if Protestants are able to smile at the religious creeds or observances of other sects, they may have, it is probable, something less pernicious, but perhaps almost as absurd, in their own creed.165 But, after a despotism of fifteen centuries, Christendom has at length thrown off the hellish yoke, whose horrid tyranny was satiated with innumerable holocausts. The once tremendous power of the infernal arts is remembered by the higher classes of society of the present age only in their proverbial language, but it is indelibly graven in the common literature of Europe. With the savage peoples of the African continent and of the barbarous regions of the globe, witchcraft or sorcery, under the name of Fetishism, flourishes with as much vigour and with as destructive effects as in Europe in the sixteenth century; and every traveller returning from Eastern or Western Africa, or from the South Pacific, testifies to the prevalence of the practice of horrid and bloody rites of a religious observance consisting of charms and incantations. With those peoples that have no further conception of the religious sentiment there obtains for the most part, at least, the magical use of sorcery.166 Superstition, ever varying, at some future date may assume, even in Europe, a form as pernicious or irrational as any of a past or of the present age; for in every age 'religion, which should most distinguish us from beasts, and ought most peculiarly to elevate us as rational creatures above brutes, is that wherein men often appear most irrational and more senseless than beasts themselves.'167

165 A modern philosopher has well illustrated this obvious truth (Natural History of Religion, sect. xii.). 'The age of superstition,' says an essayist of some notoriety, with perfect truth, 'is not past; nor,' he adds, a more questionable thesis, 'ought we to wish it past.' Some of the most eminent writers (e.g. Plutarch, Francis Bacon, Bayle, Addison) have rightly or wrongly agreed to consider fanatical superstition more pernicious than atheism. When it is considered that the scientific philosophy of Aristotle, of more than 2,000 years ago, was revived at a comparatively recent date, it may be difficult not to believe in a cyclic rather than really progressive course of human ideas, at least in metaphysics. The fact, remarked by Macaulay, that the two principal sections of Christendom in Europe remain very nearly in the limits in which they were in the sixteenth, or in the middle of the seventeenth century, is incontestable. Nor, indeed, are present facts and symptoms so adverse, as is generally supposed, to the probability of an ultimate reaction in favour of Catholic doctrine and rule, even among the Teutonic peoples, in the revolutions to which human ideas are continually subject.

166 Among the numerous evidences of recent travellers may be specially mentioned that of the well-known traveller R. F. Burton (The Lake Regions of Central Africa) for the practices of the Eastern Africans. On the African continent and elsewhere, as was the case amongst the ancient Jews, the demons are propitiated by human sacrifices. To what extent witch-superstition obtains among the Hindus, the historian of British India bears witness. 'The belief of witchcraft and sorcery,' says Mr. Mill, 'continues universally prevalent, and is every day the cause of the greatest enormities. It not unfrequently happens that Brahmins tried for murder before the English judges assign as their motive to the crime that the murdered individual had enchanted them. No fewer than five unhappy persons in one district were tried and executed for witchcraft so late as the year 1792. The villagers themselves assume the right of sitting in judgment on this imaginary offence, and their sole instruments of proof are the most wretched of all incantations (History of British India, book ii. 7). A certain instinctive or traditional dread of evil spirits excites the terrors of those peoples who have no firm belief in the providence or existence of a benevolent Divinity. Even among the Chinese-the least religious nation in the world, and whose trite formula of scepticism, 'Religions are many: Reason is one,' expresses their indifferentism to every form of religion-there exists a sort of demoniacal fear (Huc's Chinese Empire, xix.). The diabolic and magic superstitions of the Moslem are displayed in Sale's Koran and Lane's Modern Egyptians.

167 Essay concerning the Human Understanding, book iv. 18.

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TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES

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