In the Devil's Snare (17 page)

As was already indicated, the examination records for three of those interrogated on April 22 are apparently no longer extant. Mistress Mary Hollingsworth English of Salem Town was the heir of the wealthy merchant William Hollingsworth and his wife Eleanor. Probably because her husband Philip English, who will be discussed later in this chapter, was a French-speaking native of the Isle of Jersey, and her deceased mother had once been defamed as a witch, even Mary English’s high status did not prevent her from being charged with witchcraft. Still, what event triggered her accusation is unknown.
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In the other two cases, however, those of Sarah and Edward Bishop of Salem Village, enough evidence survives to suggest the origins of the charges. Like Mary English, Sarah Wilds Bishop, daughter of John Wilds by his first wife and stepdaughter of Sarah Averill Wilds, was closely related to a suspected witch. In addition, she had previously been accused of bewitching a neighbor—a woman, Christian Trask, whose death in mid-1690 had been ruled a suicide, but which was sufficiently strange to arouse suspicions that it involved “some extraordinary work of the devill.” Sarah’s husband Edward was evidently targeted because of his skeptical attitude toward the accusers, just as John Proctor had been. According to Robert Calef, a later critic of the trials, Edward Bishop attended the Salem Town examinations on April 11, and while at the inn in the town subdued a “very unruly” John Indian so that he became “very orderly.” When John had a fit while the Villagers were returning home, Bishop struck him, commenting that he was certain “he could cure them all” by the same means. As soon as Bishop left the group, Calef recorded, he was accused of being a witch.
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Even with eight new suspects in jail and nine examinations completed, the magistrates did not end their day on April 22 after closing the public session in the meetinghouse.
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As they had done with other recent confessors, they headed for the Salem prison to take an additional statement from Deliverance Hobbs without masses of spectators present. “She continued in the free acknowledging herself to be a Covenant Witch,” their record of her second confession began. Thereafter emerged a series of remarkable details. Whereas that morning Deliverance had spoken briefly and haltingly, naming no one but Sarah Wilds, Mercy Lewis, and Sarah Osborne, and offering few specifics about her malefic activity, late in the day she was primed with information that, the court clerk Stephen Sewall later commented, “fully agrees with what the afflicted persons relate.” In the interim, of course, Deliverance had been jailed in the company of her stepdaughter Abigail, Mary Warren, and other arrestees, who were far better informed than she about what had been said heretofore by the afflicted and by earlier confessors.

The previous morning, Deliverance revealed, Sarah Wilds had invited her to a witch meeting “in the Pasture by Mr Parris’s House.” Additional attendees included the Proctors, the Coreys, and Goodwives Nurse, Good, Osborne, and Bishop. “Mr Burroughs was the Preacher,” presiding at a devil’s sacrament, where Goody Wilds and Goody Nurse distributed “Red Bread, and Red Wine Like Blood.” The clergyman, who was accompanied by “a Man in a long crowned white Hat,” had “prest them to bewitch all in the Village, telling them they should do it gradually and not all att once, assureing them they should prevail.” Deliverance claimed that she had not participated in the sacrament, which led the others to threaten her with new tortures. And “she saw when Abigail Williams ran out to speak with them,” but she was “strucke blind” so could not see to whom the little girl had spoken. As she finished her statement, her stepdaughter was brought in and fell into a “dreadful fitt.” Deliverance then disclosed that Giles Corey and “the Gentlewoman of Boston” were “striving to break her Daughters Neck.”

Several aspects of this confession require extended analysis. Goody Hobbs had conflated Tituba’s two Boston women of unspecified rank and a high-status man into one “gentlewoman” from the larger town, thus introducing into the Salem crisis a mysterious figure whose possible identity later became the subject of speculation. Second, despite Stephen Sewall’s positive assessment, the confession did
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“fully agree” with Abigail Williams’s statement. As was discussed in chapter 2, the devil’s sacrament the little girl described— during which she had conversed with the “deacon” Sarah Cloyce—occurred in Parris’s pasture on March 31. Deliverance Hobbs said the one she attended took place on the morning of April 21. That the significant time discrepancy was apparently overlooked in the preparation of the case against the accused demonstrated how fully the authorities were invested in believing the truth of what they heard from afflicted and confessors alike. Moreover, Abigail Williams and Deliverance Hobbs identified different “deacons” at the diabolic sacrament, and Hobbs explicitly declined to identify Goody Cloyce as a witch. Instead, because she was “strucke blind,” she could not see Abigail’s conversational partner. Like Mercy Lewis, that other former Falmouth resident, Deliverance and Abigail Hobbs never testified against the woman who was now married to Peter Cloyce, a man whose brother Thomas they would have known in Casco.
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Finally and most important, Goody Hobbs’s confession on April 22 established a template for many others that followed. She was the first to see her former pastor George Burroughs as the celebrant of the diabolic sacrament, thereby linking Ann Jr.’s vision of him as the witches’ leader with Williams’s and Lewis’s earlier descriptions of satanic communions. Burroughs, who could not administer the sacrament in the visible world because he had not been ordained, freely did so in the invisible world under the aegis of the devil. Further, Deliverance named participants in the event with great specificity, as others would in later confessions. Yet her list had certain unique and significant characteristics. The only people formally accused prior to April 21 whom she omitted were Rachel Clinton (who was unknown to people in Salem Village and was never accused by anyone there) and Sarah Cloyce—along with, counterintuitively, the four confessors who preceded her. That pattern, in which confessors did not identify other confessors as participants in malefic gatherings, persisted until late July, when some Andover confessors finally began to name each other as Satan’s allies.

How much time passed before Essex County residents learned the contents of Goody Hobbs’s detailed confession is not clear. But even without knowing what she had said, the multitudes who attended the April 22 examinations had much to contemplate and discuss thereafter. They had witnessed extraordinary torments and physical effects among the afflicted and had heard another confession of guilt. And they had watched a diverse group of people be jailed for complicity in the devil’s plot against them, thus suggesting its widening scope and import.

ANOTHER ACCUSER FROM MAINE AND HER FIRST TARGET

After the flurry of activity on April 22, there followed a full week of relative calm, marked by no formal legal proceedings and a smaller number of spectral sightings. Villagers’ attention must have shifted from the existing group of young accusers to another teenage resident who that week endured afflictions for the first time. A refugee from Maine like Mercy Lewis, she too would have known George Burroughs in her former home. Not by coincidence did she begin having a series of strange spectral encounters just four days after the minister was first identified as the leader of the witches, nor was it surprising that her initial tormentor was the apparition of the French-speaking merchant Philip English.

In the Salem Town meetinghouse on Sunday, April 24, Susannah Sheldon was “afflicted in a very sad manner” when a spectral Philip English “step[ped] over his pew and pinshed her.”
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En route home to the Village after services, she again met Mr. English, accompanied by “a black man with a hy crouned hatt on his head and a book in hish [
sic
] hand.” English explained to her “that black man were her god and if shee would touch that boock hee would not pinsh her no more nor no bodie else should.” The following day, English’s specter reappeared to underscore the point: “if shee would not toutch the book hee would kill her.”

For the next week, Susannah continued to see frightening apparitions. Two women and a man “brought their books and bid her touct them.” She asked the specters for their names, and one volunteered that she was “old good man buck lyes wife and the other woman was her daughter mary.” Goody Buckley also revealed that she had been a witch for ten years. “Then shee opened her brest and the black man gav her two litle things like yong cats and she pit them to her brest and suckled them.” On successive days, Susannah saw the apparitions of Bridget Bishop, Mary English, and the Coreys in various combinations, usually accompanied by the black man wearing a tall hat. Goody Bishop admitted having been a witch for twenty years (a fact confirmed by the black man), and the Coreys choked and hit Susannah to prevent her from eating. She saw Martha Corey put a hairless “thing like a blake pig . . . to her brest and gave it suck . . . then she gave it to the blak man then went to praier to the blak man.” Bridget Bishop had “a streked snake . . . [in] her bosom mrs. English had a yelo bird in her bosom.” And Goody Bishop “told mee that she had kiled foar women two of them wear the fosters wifes and john trasks wife and did not name the other.”

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 10, 1675; BLACK POINT.

“When the Indeans came first it was on a Lords day in the morning,” Eleanor Barge recalled some months later, describing how the Wabanakis killed two men near Richard Foxwell’s garrison house. Early the following day the Indians “went to dunstone & fell upon Left. Alger, & the Dunston people, . . . which made the wime[n] that lived at blew poynt much afrayd, & the most part of the wimine & the children [including herself] fled away to bla[ck] poynt.” There she personally asked Captain Joshua Scottow to send some men to help the people at Dunstan, including Lieutenant Arthur Alger and his brother Andrew. But Captain Scottow replied, “there should not a man goe of[f] the Necke, for sayd Mr Scottow, they had warening enough & lyberty Enough [to have escaped] they & Arther Alger too . . . if they perish they perish.” Some of those who had taken refuge at Scottow’s garrison volunteered to aid the people under attack at Dunstan, but Scottow stopped them by declaring that “we hade brought our wifes & Children there & if we were killed whoe should Maintain them.” Goody Barge recounted Scottow’s explicit threat: “if the men goe away, I will turne away the wimine & children after.” One of the would-be volunteers sharply rebuked Scottow, calling it “a verry unhumain thing that men should be in distres and we should not see to [have?] them Releved.”
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Among the alarmed people in the Black Point garrison that day were William Sheldon, his wife Rebecca, and their little daughter Susannah, who would then have been under two years old. Rebecca Scadlock Sheldon must have been particularly terrified by the news of the attack on Dunstan, for her sister Anne was married to Arthur Alger. She and her husband were surely dissatisfied not only with Captain Scottow’s refusal to aid the outlying settlement but also with his decision instead to dispatch a messenger to Saco to the “Contry soldiers” stationed there. Nine men responded to the call for assistance, but before they arrived at Dunstan a small company of militia from Salmon Falls under Captain John Wincoll appeared on the scene to engage the Indians. On October 13, first Wincoll’s men and then those from Saco came under fierce fire from the Wabanakis. Pinned down on the shoreline at a place called Saco Sands and in sight of, but across the water from, the Black Point garrison, Wincoll sent two men to Scottow with a desperate request for aid.
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Contemporary accounts of Joshua Scottow’s response to this second call for succor differ dramatically. One of those trapped on the Saco Sands later testified that Scottow “would not send any helpe to us,” even though he had more than forty men currently in his garrison, whereas Richard Foxwell’s equidistant post, with only seven men, sent five to assist them. In contrast, a group of witnesses who were at Black Point at the time attested that Scottow did all he could to save the endangered troops, supplying residents with guns and ammunition, and insisting to reluctant volunteers that “wee could not answer to god, men, nor our owne conscience unless wee used the utmost of our endeavour to relieve those men.” Yet it was impossible to reach the beleaguered militiamen quickly, they reported, “because of the suff [surf] of the sea, the wind blowing ffresh upon the shore.” The commander of the twenty men eventually sent from Black Point to Saco Sands subsequently explained that “they having two rivers to passe and the tide, being about three parts in they Could not come to their timely releife.”
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Such descriptions of the difficulty of traveling rapidly from Black Point to reach the imperiled men on October 13 have the ring of truth. Yet all nine of the Saco men died on the beach that day, along with several of Wincoll’s militia, and in consequence Joshua Scottow’s name was indelibly blackened. The men in the Black Point garrison, who by several contemporary accounts were reluctant to jeopardize their own safety in an attempt to save the soldiers, soon began to assure everyone that they would have gone to help the men on the Saco Sands had Scottow not stopped them from doing so.
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Reports of Scottow’s cowardice and selfishness spread widely through northern New England’s gossip networks, expanding to include accounts that he refused aid to others as well. And when Massachusetts stationed soldiers at Black Point during the late fall and winter of 1675–1676, as was pointed out in chapter 3, Scottow was charged with using those men for his own personal gain. William Sheldon, whose fortified house served as a garrison, joined other residents in sustained criticism of Scottow’s conduct. Sheldon also had personal reasons to detest Scottow, for Andrew Alger died in the assault on Dunstan on October 11, and Arthur Alger was fatally wounded at the same time. Brought with other injured men to Black Point after the battle, Arthur died at William Sheldon’s garrison on October 14, 1675. The young Susannah must have witnessed both her uncle Arthur’s death agonies and her aunt’s and mother’s consequent grief.
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Major Richard Waldron later informed Scottow that because of the nasty and pervasive gossip about his cowardice, “it is very difficult to gett men to serve you, Such an odium is on your name here, that men openly professe, they had rather be hanged then Serve under your command.” The “rumors and reproaches” climaxed in several cases in which Joshua Scottow and those who censured his conduct clashed in court—once before Justice William Stoughton in Maine and twice in front of the Suffolk County court in Boston. Captain Scottow emerged victorious from these legal battles, much to the disgust of the frontier dwellers.
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As noted in chapter 3, Black Point surrendered to the Wabanakis while Joshua Scottow was defending his conduct in Boston in October 1676, and the region was not resettled until 1680 and thereafter. When the Sheldons and other former residents returned to Black Point in the early 1680s, so did Scottow. Susannah must have grown up hearing her parents denigrate the high-status neighbor they would have regarded as at least partially responsible for her uncle’s death. After Captain Scottow became George Burroughs’s patron in the mid-1680s, seeking to lure him from Falmouth to Black Point, Burroughs too probably became the subject of negative comments in the Sheldon household. At the very least, the minister’s association with the hated Scottow would not have worked in his favor with the Sheldons and other long-term residents of the area; that could even explain why they failed to construct a house for him.
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In the early fall of 1688, shortly after the Second Indian War began, William Sheldon relocated his family to Salem Village. His oldest son Godfrey, 24, who volunteered for militia service in Maine after the fall of Fort Loyal in Casco, was killed by the Indians in early July 1690. William himself died (probably from gangrene or tetanus) in Salem Village at the age of 68 in December 1691, two weeks after he fell and cut his knee. Accordingly, in late April 1692, when she saw the spectral vision of Philip English coming toward her in the Salem Town meetinghouse, Susannah was living in Salem Village with her recently widowed mother, Rebecca; her older brother, Ephraim; and her four sisters (two older and two younger than she).
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The target of Susannah Sheldon’s first accusation, Philip English, was one of the wealthiest merchants in New England. Born Philippe L’Anglois on the Channel Isle of Jersey in 1651, he immigrated to North America as a young man. By far the most prominent member of the small Jerseyan community in Essex County, English had long engaged in commerce with Spain, the Caribbean, and his home island. Like other northern New England merchants, he traded salt fish for manufactured goods from Europe and produce from the tropics. Accordingly, ships owned or employed by him would have sailed frequently along the coast of Maine, north to French Acadia, and beyond to the Newfoundland Banks. As a native French speaker whose business placed him potentially in regular contact with the French (and their Wabanaki allies), English undoubtedly aroused the suspicions of his Anglo-American neighbors after the Second Indian War began in 1688. Despite—or perhaps because of—his prominence and wealth, his origins and mercantile pursuits made him a marked man in the climate of fear pervading Essex County in 1692.
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A prime indication of the extent of that fear had surfaced during late May 1690, about two weeks after the fall of Fort Loyal. Rumors flew through the countryside that Isaac Morrill, a “jarzy man or French man” long resident in Essex County, had been seen carrying a concealed gun and reconnoitering “Pikes Garason” at Salisbury. Other stories claimed that he and another Jerseyan named George Mousher had been attempting to persuade local slaves to “goe for canada and Joyne with the french against the English and So come downe with the french and Indians upon the backside of the cuntry and distroy all the English and Save none but only the Negro and Indian Servants and . . . the french would come with vessells and lay at the harbours that none Should escape.” Morrill was reported to have dispatched four French spies to “veiw all our garrisons & our strength,” and to have himself “veiwed all the garrisons Eastward & westward so far as new Yorke.” It was even said that “some Easterne garrisons were watched by women.”
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Although the scare involving Morrill and Mousher seems to have dissipated without incident, the generalized fear of the French did not vanish. In late December 1691, the Massachusetts Bay General Court issued an order revealing the continuing concern of the colony’s leaders about potential internal enemies. Even though New England’s Protestants had welcomed refugee Huguenots after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1686, the General Court observed that some recent arrivals had been “of a contrary Religion and Interest.” The presence of “such a mixt Company amongst us, especially in and about the Sea Ports and Frontier Towns,” endangered the “Publick Safety” in “a time of War.” Accordingly, it ruled that after January 31, 1691/2, no French person could “take up their Residence, or be in” port or frontier towns without permission from the authorities, nor could they set up shops or engage in any trade. Philip English had long since established himself in Salem Town, so whether the order applied to him might have been contested, but as a practical matter it singled him out for special attention.
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In addition, English violated local norms defining appropriate conduct in business. As the administrator of the estate of his mother-in-law, Eleanor Hollingsworth, he aggressively asserted claims to two tracts of land that Richard Hollingsworth (Mary English’s grandfather) had decades earlier informally designated for his younger son, Richard, but for which he had never drafted legal conveyances. Neighbors’ testimony in the two cases, both filed in the fall of 1690, revealed that they all regarded the land as rightfully belonging first to Richard Hollingsworth Jr. and then later to his widow. Yet English contended that since Richard Sr. had died “withoute Alienating the Same from his Heire at Law” (that is, his older son, William, Mary’s father), the land should fall to Philip, as Mary’s husband, “by Linniall Desent.” In the early- and mid-seventeenth-century colonies, many transactions were conducted orally, and men were expected to respect those agreements, even though written records were lacking. English’s lawsuits therefore must have scandalized such witnesses as William Beale of Marblehead. Beale had been present when Richard Sr. agreed with Thomas Farrar to break up and fence four acres of land for Richard Jr. That land had been held by the younger Hollingsworth “without Contradicktion by any man as I know of,” Beale assured the court. Not surprisingly, English lost both cases as local juries upheld customary claims rather than the letter of the law, but he appealed at least one of them to the Court of Assistants, where the outcome is unknown.
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