God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England (21 page)

There are several ways of interpreting this episode. According to the ‘true witness’, it was a demonstration of ‘the wonderful work of Almighty God’, even ‘in these days so full of wickedness & impiety, so full of heresy & infidelity’. In granting his priests ‘such power and authority … to drive out & expel devils’, God had revealed the true Church. And ‘so would He have it done in the presence of many to give testimony of the same to the honour of His holy name & confirmation of the Catholic cause’. In an age when people noted supernatural phenomena as a matter of course, when they divined for treasure, executed witches and would have been hard-pressed to identify a precise boundary between religion and magic, the exorcism accounts in the
Miracle Book
were powerful propaganda. Here was the armoury of the resurgent Church of Rome in triumphant combat with the devil. ‘The intervention of heaven was undoubted,’ Weston later wrote in his
Autobiography
, ‘and incredulous onlookers were astounded.’
⁶
Indeed, they became part of the ritual, the priest exhorting them to strengthen their devotion and redouble their prayers, so that when the devil was eventually repulsed, triumph was shared, faith was reinforced and the word was spread.

Although the spectators at Hackney, ‘which were very many, respecting the dangers of the time and place’, were hardly unsympathetic to the Catholic cause, the subsequent publicising of the event aimed at wider conversion. Indeed, it has been persuasively argued that the exorcisms were ‘a crucial arm of the Tridentine missionary campaign to reconcile schismatics and evangelize Protestants’.
⁷
Throughout the account of Sara’s exorcism, the devil is aligned with official religion. ‘All Protestants and heretics are at my right hand near unto me,’ he announces. ‘The schismatics’ – those Catholics who went to church – ‘are at my left hand somewhat farther off, yet notwithstanding they are all mine.’ He summons his pursuivant allies to capture the priests, but they are thwarted by the combined might of the Trinity and the Virgin Mary. When the devil is finally expelled, it
is as much a triumph for Catholicism over the Elizabethan Settlement as it is for God over the devil. ‘Be then assured,’ the priests at Hackney proclaim, ‘that we will all spend our lives to expel & drive out of England all heretical spirits, & that we will yield our lives to save the Queen’s Majesty’s soul.’

Here was a strain of post-Reformation English Catholicism that was muscular and ambitious. While many individuals preferred to lie low and wait, there were others – secular priests as well as Jesuits; laymen as well as clergymen – who were determined to effect change. The exorcisms of 1585–6 and their subsequent advertisement can be seen as part of the same evangelising impulse that stimulated William Allen to set up his seminary and Robert Persons his printing press; it drove Henry Vaux towards the Catholic underground and his father into communication with the Queen’s enemies on the Continent. A similar fervour sent men and women scrambling under the scaffold for ‘fresh green new relics’ in order to make saints of their martyrs, even though Rome would not recognise them as such until the twentieth century. Here were English Catholics, in defiance of Elizabethan law and free from the strict regulations of Tridentine Europe, attempting to seize the initiative and reclaim their faith.

Not all of their co-religionists were delighted with their behaviour. According to Friswood Williams, who was ‘dispossessed’ soon after her younger sister Sara, the exorcisms divided the community ‘in so much as divers ancient Catholics themselves did utterly dislike them, and the priests themselves grew to be afraid’. Sara herself later claimed that one priest, Father Yaxley, shook his head when she told him what had happened to her, and said ‘he was very sorry for it, and that he hoped they had repented themselves for dealing so with her’. When pressed for his opinion as to whether or not Sara had actually been demonically possessed, he closed ranks and ‘would give her no other answer, but shaking his head, will[ed] her to be contented, seeing all was now past’.
⁸

Nor, it seems, were the exorcisms particularly effective in winning souls. Had the priest who boasted of five hundred conversions been remotely accurate, one would have expected a robust response from the authorities, but there was little evidence of immediate concern. According to Weston, Lord Burghley ‘merely laughed’ when informed of the practice and ‘brushed it all aside as probable fraud and as a series of impostures devised by priests in order to deceive people’.
⁹
At the turn of the century, however, the events of 1585–6 became interesting to the establishment and an investigation was launched. It may be that with time the popular appeal of spirit dispossession had grown, but there were also intersectarian rivalries at play. The enquiry was spearheaded by the Bishop of London, Richard Bancroft, and his chaplain, Samuel Harsnett, the future Archbishop of York. In 1603 Harsnett published his findings in a book entitled:

A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures, to with-draw the harts of her Majesties Subiects from their allegeance, and from the truth of Christian Religion professed in England, under the pretence of casting out devils
.

Practised by Edmunds, alias Weston a Jesuit, and divers Romish Priests his wicked associates
.

Where-unto are annexed the Copies of the Confessions, and Examinations of the parties themselves, which were pretended to be possessed, and dispossessed, taken upon oath before her Majesties Commissioners, for Causes Ecclesiasticall
.
¹⁰

The full title betrays the churchmen’s agenda. William Weston was only one of around twelve Catholic priests involved in the exorcisms of the mid-1580s, and he was the only Jesuit, but Harsnett gave him prominence in order to discredit the Society and capitalise on the divisions within the Catholic community at the time of publication. Harsnett and Bancroft insisted that the age of miracles had long since ceased. They had recently secured the conviction for fraud of John Darrell, a radical Puritan exorcist, and they extracted ‘confessions’ from some of the 1585–6 demoniacs in their ongoing campaign to expose all such practices as ‘diabolical legerdemain’.
¹¹

Harsnett’s retrospective commentary on the events at Hackney, Denham and elsewhere is no more reliable, therefore, than the heavily didactic accounts written by the Catholic eyewitnesses. Both are exploitative works of religious propaganda. Harsnett’s latest editor has shown that he asked leading questions, suppressed information that did not suit his agenda and may even have tampered with witness statements.
¹²
Needless to say, his ‘immodest style and lascivious pen’ (as one Puritan divine described it
¹³
) attracted the playwrights of the day. The
Declaration
was a source for Ben Jonson’s
Volpone
and supplied
Shakespeare with the names of the fake demons by which Edgar protected himself from unfair persecution.

In Harsnett’s hands, the exorcism of Sara Williams is a sordid tale of mental, physical and sexual abuse. It may very well be the case that some readers have concluded as much from the Catholic account extracted above from the Brudenell manuscript. After all, a group of men in authority had fumigated a teenaged girl with noxious substances and forced her to imbibe a ‘hallowed drink’ that made her vomit. At one stage of the proceedings, Sara had suffered a ‘beating … about the head with a maniple’; at another, she had been forced to wear an alb.
^fn4
Her torture and humiliation before a conventicle of her superiors must have been terrifying. After complaining that the devil ‘lieth in the bottom of my belly’, she had also had to endure a relic being applied there by ‘one of the women’ in the Vaux household. After much torment, the devil had reportedly left her body ‘in the likeness of water’.

According to Sara’s deposition, taken sixteen years later on 24 April 1602 and published the following year in Harsnett’s
Declaration
, the priests, ‘when they were weary with dealing with her’, would announce that:

the wicked spirits were gone down into her leg, and sometimes into her foot, and that they should rest there for that time. And again, when they took her in hand the next time, they would begin to hunt the devil from the foot to bring him upwards, of purpose as they said to cause him, when they had him in her head, to go out of her mouth, ears, eyes, or nose. And the manner of their hunting of him was to follow him with their hands (as they did pretend) along all the parts of her body.

At one time, when it began to be with this examinate according to the manner of women (as since she hath perceived), whereby she was much troubled, the priests did pretend that the devil did rest in the most secret part of her body. Whereupon they devised to apply the relics unto it, and gave her such sliber-sauces as made her (as she was persuaded) much worse than otherwise she thinketh she should have been. At some times they would cause a maid that served the Lord Vaux to apply the relics unto the place: the which their dealing with her (she saith) she doth now loathe the memory of it.
¹⁴

‘Good God!’ Harsnett exclaimed, ‘what do we hear? Or is it but a dream? Or have we ears to hear such impious unnatural villainy?’ He lambasted the ‘fiery holy hands’ of the priests, ‘having a rank itch in their fingers to be fiddling at that sport’. He questioned why the devil would go anywhere near ‘that nameless part’ in Sara, since the priests had made it their ‘quest and haunt which they had hunted sore, had crossed, recrossed and surcrossed with their holy hands’.
¹⁵

It seems a tragedy that something as natural as the onset of menstruation could be interpreted as a sign of possession, but contemporaries were convinced of the ubiquity of the devil, who was known to delight in blood, and the ‘monthly flux of excrementitous and unprofitable blood’ was regarded with suspicion and hostility.
¹⁶
Menstruating women were polluted and polluting and if, like Sara and her fellow demoniac Anne Smith, they suffered from ‘fits of the mother’ – a condition that seems to have combined period pains and hysteria – then there might have been further cause to single them out for the exorcist’s chair.
^fn5
The intense drama of the exorcisms may also have encouraged over-credulity and the suspension of common sense. If Sara’s stomach rumbled, the priests would make it a ‘wonderful matter’. Likewise, another demoniac, William Trayford, was suspected of having a devil in his toe because he sometimes ‘felt a spice of the gout’. Harsnett reacted at his sneering best:

Now, what a woeful taking are all those poor creatures that have about them by birth, casualty or mishap any close imper, ache or other more secret infirmity? When a pain in a maid’s belly, a stitch in her side, an ache in her head, a cramp in her leg, a tinkling in her toe (if the good exorcist please), must needs hatch a devil and bring forth such chair-work, fire-work, and devil-work as you shall hear hereafter?
¹⁷

Although Sara later condemned the
Miracle Book
writers ‘for their false and dissembling dealing with her’, she was wary of accusing her own exorcists of fraud. At the time and during her subsequent examination when she was encouraged to cast aspersions, she seems to have believed that they had acted in good faith. Indeed, she admitted that she would ‘feed them with visions, saying she had seen this and that when she had seen no such matter, but only spake to content them’.
¹⁸
The priests saw and heard what they fervently wanted to see and hear: a terrified girl, susceptible to maladies and mood swings, inhabited by the devil and in desperate need of the miraculous cure that only the Catholic Church could provide. Harsnett, Bancroft and their faction were equally bent on concluding that Sara was a victim of ‘egregious Popish imposture’. If both camps were guilty of sensational writing, it might charitably be attributed to artistic licence: reality might have been heightened, but it was still reality, still the truth in the eyes of its beholders.
¹⁹

It is not the historian’s job to make lofty judgements. The rights and wrongs of the case depended, and perhaps still depend, very much on one’s viewpoint. There were the inevitable few who acted in bad faith,
^fn6
but most, surely, did not. William Weston was so certain of the miraculous and proselytising power of the exorcisms that he ‘wished that the Queen had been present, or one of her Council, to witness the sights, or that they could have taken place in public’.
²⁰
The Vauxes, for their part, not only hosted some of the sessions, but
also regaled guests with the details afterwards. The keynote was triumphalism. There is no reason to doubt that most spectators were indeed ‘astonished’ by the charisma of the priests and the miracle they believed they had seen. Their pity for Sara – ‘there was not one person which beheld her distress whose eyes flowed not with tears for compassion of her pains’
²¹
– was transformed into thanksgiving at her deliverance. Harsnett may have mocked their credulity, but he did not question the sincerity of their emotions.

On 8 October 1586, Sara’s confessor and exorcist, Robert Dibdale (born around thirty years earlier in the parish of Stratford-upon-Avon), was executed at Tyburn. Shortly afterwards, Sara was imprisoned in Oxford for recusancy, though there is no record of her being questioned about exorcism. It took fourteen weeks of ‘earnest suit’ and a great deal of venison ‘bestowed upon the scholars’ to secure her release. She was sheltered by the recusant community and ‘conveyed from place to place for almost four years’. In the early 1590s, she was examined about the exorcisms, but refused to disclose anything and it was only in April 1602, after her sister had informed on her, that Sara gave a deposition. By then she was in her thirties, married and a mother of five, despite the fears of the priests at Hackney that ‘the devil had torn those parts in such sort as that she could not conceive’.
²²