In the Devil's Snare (20 page)

THE SECOND CONFESSIONS OF ABIGAIL HOBBS AND MARY WARREN

The renewed questioning of Abigail Hobbs on Thursday, May 12, focused solely on George Burroughs and malefic activities in Casco.
¹⁸
Did the minister bring you poppets of his wives, his children, or “the Eastward Souldres” to “stick pinns into”? the justices inquired. Abigail said no, but admitted that Burroughs had directed her to afflict various residents of Falmouth, although she remained vague about the identity of most of her victims. Some “lived att the fort side of the River about half a mile from the fort, toward Capt. Bracketts,” she disclosed, and more resided “Just by the Other toward James Andrews’s.” Her targets were, Abigail declared, “both Boys and Girls,” who “dyed” from the afflictions. Burroughs “in Bodily person” had brought her the necessary small images, along with pins to stick into them. And “when he appeared to tempt mee to set my hand to the Book, he then appeared in person, and I felt his hand
at the Same time,” Abigail indicated. She admitted being acquainted with Sarah Burroughs, but denied knowledge of “any pop-pits pricked to kill her.”

The teenager identified by name only one of her purported victims: Mary Lawrence. In response to leading questions, Abigail said that she had stuck “thorns” into “the middle of [Mary’s] body” because Mary had spoken badly of her. But the initiative to harm Mary had not been hers alone. Burroughs had brought her Mary Lawrence’s image “in his own person Bodily . . . Abroad a little way of[f] from our house . . . Before this Indian Warr.” When the justices asked why Burroughs had targeted Mary, Abigail informed them that he told her “He was angry with that family.” As was pointed out in chapter 4, Mary’s father, Robert Lawrence, led the opposition to Sylvanus Davis and Edward Tyng, and Burroughs in all likelihood was aligned with the latter two men in Falmouth during the 1680s. The resulting antagonisms must have been fierce indeed for a girl as young as Abigail Hobbs to be aware of them.

Hathorne and Corwin surely found Abigail’s second confession less useful than they had hoped. She now acknowledged that Burroughs had asked her to afflict other residents of Casco through the use of poppets and pins, and also that she had herself killed some people by malefice. She even admitted having been a witch “these Six years,” for she had signed not one but two covenants with the devil (the first for two years, the second for four). But at the same time she denied any knowledge of the most serious charges advanced by Putnam Jr., Lewis, and Williams, taken collectively: that Burroughs had killed his second wife and that he had bewitched Andros’s troops during the winter of 1688–1689. Instead, she revealed only that the clergyman had taken revenge on the daughter of one of his political opponents and had asked her to afflict unnamed, unknown numbers of “Boys and Girls.” Moreover, when the magistrates asked if she had seen “severall Witches at the Eastward,” she responded unhelpfully, “Yes, But I dont know who they were.”
¹⁹

From the magistrates’ perspective, then, their examination of Mary Warren that same day must have proved more satisfactory. Although she added little to their case against the clergyman, she had much to say about others who had previously been accused, and she revealed the identity of two more witches, for whom they immediately issued arrest warrants.

The justices began interrogating Mary Warren essentially where they had stopped on April 21, posing questions about John Proctor’s bringing her the devil’s book.
²⁰
Had she realized what she was doing when she touched it? they asked. “I did nott know itt then but I know itt now,” she admitted. She also confessed having employed thorns and poppets to afflict Putnam’s daughter and Parris’s niece. Pressed to reveal more, she indicated that the apparitions of two Salem Town women, Alice Parker and Ann Pudeator, had brought her poppets of Lewis and Walcott, respectively, and that she had stuck pins in both. Furthermore, the specters had been in a talkative mood: “Goody parker tould me she had bin a Witch these 12 years & more; & pudeator tould me that she had done damage.” She listed Goodwives Nurse, Cloyce, and Bridget Bishop as witches, along with Dorcas Good and Giles Corey. She also revealed that Goody Corey “att my masters house in person” had predicted that “I should be condemned for a Witch as well as she hirself, . . . & she said that the children would cry out & bring out all.” But Warren denied knowing how long John and Elizabeth Proctor had been witches; “they never tould me.”

The clergymen John Higginson of Salem Town and John Hale of Beverly arrived near the end of the examination, just in time to witness the “dreadfull fitts” Warren suffered upon again hearing the names of Alice Parker and Ann Pudeator. The women’s specters then seemed to vie with each other by confessing to a series of murders, most of them involving deaths at sea. (For example, Parker’s apparition, reported Warren, said she had “cast away” Captain Thomas Westgate’s vessel.) The admissions included Pudeator’s statement that she had killed her husband “by giving him something whereby he fell sick and dyed” about a decade earlier. Goody Parker disclosed that she had bewitched Mary’s sister, striking her dumb, and Goody Pudeator’s apparition revealed that she and Burroughs had tried to hinder the current prosecution by bewitching the magistrates’ horses. Finally, Burroughs’s specter informed Mary that “he killed his wife off of Cape Ann.” (Mary Warren, unlike Abigail Hobbs, thus demonstrated her familiarity with the gossip about Sarah Burroughs’s death.)

In ordering the immediate arrest of Alice Parker and Ann Pudeator, Hathorne and Corwin charged them with afflicting Warren that very day during her examination. Both women lived in Salem Town, as did (evidently) Warren’s own family. Alice, about whom little is known, was married to John Parker, a mariner; her neighbors had suspected her of witchcraft for at least eight years. Ann Pudeator had lived in Falmouth in the 1650s and 1660s with her first husband, Thomas Greenslade, but they moved to Salem before the First Indian War. (Two of her adult children remained behind in Casco.) After Thomas’s death she married Jacob Pudeator, a Jerseyan blacksmith who was probably twenty years her junior, and whose first wife she had nursed in a final illness in 1676. Jacob died in August 1682, and so she had been widowed for nearly a decade. Ann had long been suspected of practicing maleficium and perhaps of killing both her second husband and his first wife.
²¹

The record of Goody Pudeator’s examination on May 12 does not survive, but that of Alice Parker does.
²²
The magistrates confronted the sailor’s wife with Warren’s charge that her apparition had admitted destroying Captain Westgate’s ship and crew. Goody Parker denied any part in the loss of the vessel and rejected the claim that she had bewitched Mary’s sister. Mary, who was “grievously afflicted” throughout Parker’s interrogation, described the reason for that allegation: after her father had failed to fulfill a promise to mow some grass for Goody Parker, she had come to their house, “and told him he had better he had done it.” Soon thereafter, Warren reported, “Her Sister fell ill and shortly after Her Mother was taken ill, and dyed.” Mary thereby implied that the angry witch had attacked them both. Warren also affirmed that Parker’s specter told her about attending “the Bloody Sacrament in Mr Parris’s Pasture” along with about thirty other witches. And Mary, like the afflicted at the examinations of Susannah Martin and Dorcas Hoar ten days earlier, was unable to approach Parker, “but fel backward immediately into a dreadful fitt.”

Warren was not Goody Parker’s only accuser that day. Margaret Jacobs attested that she had seen Alice’s specter “in the North feild” the previous Friday night (May 6). Marshal George Herrick, who had arrested her, “affirmed to her face” that she had announced to him that “there were threscore Witches of the Company,” and Alice was unable to explain how she had produced that figure. One of the ministers of her church, Nicholas Noyes, testified about a previous conversation with her “in a Time of sicknes” about “her witchcrafts whether she were not Guilty.” All in all, by the end of the examination Hathorne and Corwin appeared to have good reason to think that Parker was a witch.

After they finished the examinations on May 12, the magistrates ordered a group of seven prisoners (including Mary English and Bridget Bishop) moved to Boston, to join some already incarcerated there. Tituba, Sarah and Dorcas Good, Sarah Osborne, John and Elizabeth Proctor, Rebecca Nurse, Sarah Cloyce, George Burroughs, and Susannah Martin had all been sent to the larger facility following their interrogations; Osborne, ill when arrested, had recently died in Boston. Hathorne and Corwin probably regarded the Salem Town jail as already overcrowded, so they directed that Jacobs, Parker, and Pudeator be held in Boston as well. They also might have had little confidence in the ability of the Essex County jailer to prevent a determined prisoner from fleeing from custody. Less than a year earlier they had tried a case involving a successful escapee who had taken advantage of doors carelessly left open. A fellow prisoner testified that a jailer should be “a responsabel Man and fathful,” but that William Downton was “nather.” He explained: “the counti has a good preson and tou dores and tou lockes to each Dor[,] a preson yeard and a lock to the gat[e] but the gat[e] stands al wa[y]s open,” as did “the nor[th] dor.” Presumably the presence of so many accused witches had led to improved security, but Hathorne and Corwin surely wished to take no chances with the suspects.
²³

On either May 12 or 13, Mary Warren also accused another person of witchcraft: the thirty-seven-year-old Abigail Soames, who had been living at the home of Samuel Gaskill, a prominent Quaker in Salem Town.
²⁴
A single woman from Gloucester, Abigail was recuperating from smallpox and, according to Goody Gaskill, had “kept her Bed for most part these thirteen months,” except for occasionally going out “in the Night.” When Soames was questioned at Thomas Beadle’s on Friday, May 13, under the watchful eye of the Reverend Mr. Noyes, Warren suffered especially “dreadful” fits. Soames’s apparition, commented an anonymous scribe, “bitt her so dreadfully that the Like was never seen on any of the aflicted.” Asked to explain Warren’s torments, Soames replied that “the Enemy hurt her” (thus suggesting that perhaps Satan was attacking Warren directly) and attempted to number herself among the afflicted. Insisting that she was “Distracted many atime,” she declared that “I thought I have seen many a Body hurt mee, and might have accused many as well as she doth,” particularly certain residents of Gloucester.

The examination of Abigail Soames is significant because it marked the first time that the magistrates employed the version of a touch test that would eventually become commonplace. “Soams being Commanded while Warren was in a dreadful fit, to take Warren by the hand, the said Warren immediately recovered,” recorded the scribe. “This Experiment was tryed three times over and the Issue the same.” Conversely, however, Warren could not touch Soames. “Altho she Assayed severall times to do it with great Earnestness she was not able, But fell down into a dreadful fit.” Asked why she could not approach Soames, Warren revealed that “she saw the apparition of Somes come from her Body, and would meet her, and thrust her with Vialunce back again.” The scribe remarked that whenever Soames looked at Warren she “struck her into another most dreadful and horible fit,” and so “she practised her Witchcrafts several times before the Court.”

After the examination had concluded, both Mary Warren and Margaret Jacobs saw the apparition of George Burroughs. The spectral clergyman bit Warren, “which bite was seen by many,” the scribe recorded, and Burroughs predicted to Jacobs “that her Grandfather would be hanged,” which made her weep. Also present were two other apparitions. The spectral gathering certainly seemed to indicate that the examinee, Abigail Soames, had actively participated in the witch conspiracy.

Five months later, Thomas Brattle, a prominent critic of the trials, recorded the explanation for the efficacy of the touch test developed by “the Salem Justices, at least some of them.” The afflicted, having been first struck down by “venemous and malignant particles, that were ejected from the eye” of the suspected witch, were cured because the witch’s touch allowed the particles to “return to the body whence they came, and so leave the afflicted persons pure and whole.” Although Brattle thought that reasoning dubious, the magistrates clearly found it persuasive for many crucial months.
²⁵

On May 14, Hathorne and Corwin, acting on a new complaint filed by Thomas Putnam and Nathaniel Ingersoll, ordered the arrest of eight more people for afflicting the core group of sufferers and unnamed others. Those listed on the warrant included all persons already identified as witches but not yet taken into custody, along with several new suspects. Three of the group fled to avoid arrest, but the other five were apprehended and brought to Salem Village in preparation for questioning on Tuesday, May 17, at Ingersoll’s inn.
²⁶

Those examinations, though, were postponed a day because of a long-anticipated but nonetheless unexpected event: the arrival of the new governor. On the evening of Saturday, May 14, Sir William Phips sailed into Boston harbor on the
Nonesuch,
an English frigate. “Candles are lighted before He gets into Townhouse,” Samuel Sewall recorded in his diary. “Eight companies [of militia] wait on Him to his house, and then on Mr. [Increase] Mather to his. Made no volleys because ’twas Satterday night.” When they learned of Phips’s arrival, Hathorne and Corwin traveled to Boston to participate in the welcoming ceremonies and to be sworn in as councilors.
²⁷

CONTINUED PROCEEDINGS UNDER NEW AUSPICES

Sir William Phips, whom Cotton Mather described in his diary as “one of my own Flock, and one of my dearest Friends,” was closely aligned with both Mathers, father and son. Increase Mather, dispatched to London in spring 1688 by the leaders of Massachusetts Bay, achieved remarkable success as lobbyist and emissary over the next three years. Although criticized in some quarters for his inability to resurrect the old charter (an outcome many New Englanders would have preferred), Mather exercised great influence not only on the drafting of the charter of 1691 but also on the appointment of the governor and councilors who would implement it. London officials were bar-raged with sharp criticism of the “Bostoners” after Andros’s overthrow in April 1689, yet Mather managed to win a charter that retained some of the colony’s traditional autonomy. Even more significant, perhaps, as his proud son Cotton observed, “all the
Councellors
of the Province, are of my own Father’s Nomination.” The elder Mather thus ensured that at the outset of the new regime all the important decisions would continue to be made by essentially the same men who had been running the colony for years.
²⁸

And their leader would be Sir William Phips, a native of Maine and a hero of the Second Indian War for his capture of Port Royal in Acadia in 1690, in spite of his failed excursion against Quebec later that same year. The son of an Indian trader and gunsmith, Phips had been born near the mouth of the Kennebec River in 1651 at a family homestead destroyed in August 1676, during the First Indian War. He grew up well acquainted with the local Wabanakis and their ways, and while governor in the 1690s accounted himself an expert on Indian affairs. Apprenticed to a shipbuilder in his youth, Phips had little formal education. Although he learned to read as an adult, he could barely sign his own name. While working as a shipwright in Boston in the early 1670s, he met and married a young widow, Mary Spencer Hull, whose father lived for a time in Saco as a partner of Brian Pendleton. Between his wife’s siblings and his own numerous siblings and half siblings, William Phips had many close relatives familiar with affairs in Maine. Some of them had lived at Casco or Black Point and knew George Burroughs.
²⁹

In 1687, Phips, by then a ship captain obsessed with treasure seeking, located the valuable wreck of a Spanish galleon on a reef off the coast of Hispaniola. After Phips returned to England with a cargo of gold and silver worth more than £200,000, King James II knighted him as a reward for his service to the crown and nation. Over the next few years Phips lived alternately in London and Boston, while in England assisting Increase Mather in his dealings with colonial officials, and while in New England participating sporadically in the war effort. From March 1691 until his appointment as governor the following November, he remained in London, simultaneously defending his conduct during 1690, proposing a new expedition against Canada, advancing various schemes involving trade and development in Maine, and promoting his candidacy for governor.

When he arrived on May 14, Sir William Phips must have been shocked to discover that jails in Boston and Salem were bulging with thirty-eight people awaiting trial for witchcraft. (Initial word of the crisis reached London long after his departure.) He later wrote, indeed, that he found “this Province miserably harassed with a most Horrible witchcraft or Possession of Devills which had broke in upon severall Townes” and filled with “the loud cries and clamours of the friends of the afflicted people” demanding that he take action against the suspects. “The generality of the people,” he asserted, “represented the matter to me as reall witchcraft and gave very strange instances of the same.”
³⁰

Amid the festivities celebrating the onset of a new regime, he therefore had to move swiftly to establish appropriate legal machinery to organize the necessary grand jury sessions and trials. On Monday, May 16, his commission as governor of Massachusetts (and head of New England’s militia) was formally read, and he and the other office-holders present were sworn in. The council included several men who had participated in questioning the suspected witches—Samuel Sewall and Bartholomew Gedney in addition to Corwin and Hathorne—as had the new lieutenant governor, William Stoughton. Another councilor, Robert Pike of Salisbury, did not attend the ceremony because he was busy recording depositions in the case of Susannah Martin. These experienced men, Phips later indicated, advised him as he decided how to handle the unexpected crisis.
³¹

The first council meeting on May 24 appears to have been largely ceremonial, but three days later the council took an important substantive step. “Upon Consideration, That there are many Criminal Offenders now in Costody some whereof have lyen long, and many inconveniences attending the thronging of the Goals, at this hot Season of the year, There being no Judicatories or Courts of Justice yet Established,” read the official minutes, “Ordered, That a Special Commission of Oyer and Terminer be made out.” A few days earlier, the governor had summoned an assembly to meet on June 8, but that assembly might well take weeks or months to reestablish a full court system. Royal governors could convene special courts if necessary; Phips therefore employed the common colonial device of a Court of Oyer and Terminer (“to hear and determine” in French legal terminology) to handle the witchcraft prosecutions. Nine judges (who will be discussed in the next chapter) were named to the court. Stephen Sewall, Samuel’s brother and the man who had sheltered Betty Parris in March, was appointed court clerk, and Thomas Newton—an English lawyer practicing in Boston who had a year earlier prosecuted the Leisler rebels at a Court of Oyer and Terminer in New York—was named as attorney general.
³²

Several days later, Sir William Phips dictated letters to London reporting on his reception in Boston and his first two weeks as governor of the colony. Surely overemphasizing considerably, although for obvious reasons, he remarked that “the harts of the People here are very much Transported with joy & their mouths Filled with expressions of Thankfullnesse to their Majesties” for the new charter government. Phips described the public reading of his commission and the charter, the convening of the council, the swearing-in ceremonies, and his call for elections to the assembly. He did
not
mention his establishment of a Court of Oyer and Terminer, or the reason for it. Instead he wrote to the Earl of Nottingham, the secretary of state, “the small t[ime] since my arrivall admitts of noething more that is Matter [to] acquaint your Lordship with.” To William Blathwayt, the secretary for plantations, he said essentially the same thing: “I have but little to say at present, for the short time Since my Landing could not produce much.” Phips might possibly have seen the setting up of a special court to deal with unresolved criminal cases as so routine as to require no comment on his part. Yet that those thirty-eight “Offenders now in Costody” were charged with witchcraft was certainly unusual. Most likely, Phips’s councilors advised him to write nothing official about the evolving crisis for the time being, and to wait instead until more of the outcome could be known.
³³

While the governor was organizing his administration in Boston, the specters, especially those of John Willard and Sarah Buckley, appeared repeatedly in Salem Village. The first of many subsequent episodes of witchfinding by members of the core group of accusers occurred on the evening of May 14. In yet another indication of her leadership role, Mercy Lewis was taken to Wills Hill, the home of the Wilkins family, to see “the afflected parsons there.” Mercy, asked whether she saw any apparitions, declared that Willard was attacking both Bray Wilkins and his grandson Daniel, a vision reconfirmed by Ann Jr. the next night. Ann furthermore disclosed that Willard’s specter told her that he wanted to kill Daniel, “but he had not power enufe yet to kill him: but he would goe to Mr Burroughs and git power to kill daniel wilknes.” Then on Monday, May 16, Mercy and Mary Walcott informed a group of onlookers that Willard and Buckley were “upon his Throat & upone [Daniel’s] brest and presed him & [choked] him.” After Daniel died that same night, a coroner’s jury officially concluded that “to the best of our judgments we cannot but apprehend but that he dyed an unnatural death by sume cruell hands of witchcraft or diabolicall act as is evident to us both by what we have seen and heard consarning his death.” When he noted the teenage Daniel’s decease, Parris recorded beside his name “bewitched to death.”
³⁴

The next day Marshal George Herrick wrote to Hathorne and Corwin in Boston to inform them that the elusive fugitive John Willard had finally been captured in Nashaway (Groton), and that “he No sooner arrived butt the afflicted persons made such an out crye that I was forced to pinion him.”
³⁵
On May 18, the magistrates themselves returned to Salem Village to conduct the interrogation. “That you were fled from Authority . . . is an acknowledgment of guilt,” intoned Hathorne, “but yet notwithstanding we require you to confess the truth in this matter.” Willard admitted being “affrighted” and thinking that “by my withdrawing it might be better,” but proclaimed his innocence. The magistrates confronted him with testimony involving not only the current afflictions but also the “dreadfull murders” with which he had been charged, reading to him statements by Lewis, Putnam Jr., and Sheldon. Six sufferers accused Willard of afflicting them then and there. Other witnesses against Willard also intervened. Benjamin Wilkins, Bray’s youngest son, testified that despite protestations of “natural affections” for his wife and her family, Willard “abused his wife much & broke sticks about her in beating of her.” Another man remarked that Willard had been “very cruel to poor creatures.” And when Willard suggested that “my wife might be called,” a third man stepped forward to attest that Willard “with his own mouth told him of beating his wife.”

The justices next employed physical tests. Susannah attempted to approach Willard, “but fell down immediately.” When they asked her why she could not come near the accused, she explained that “the black man stood between us.” Willard then took her hand, with no discernible effect on her torments. But when Warren “in a great fit” was carried to him, he “clasping his hand upon her arm,” she recovered, just as she had five days earlier at the examination of Abigail Soames. Willard, quick to recognize a contradiction, asked “why . . . was it not before so with Susannah Sheldon?” The “standers by” responded, “because . . . you did not clasp your hand before,” thus revealing both their intense scrutiny of Willard and their belief in the reliability of touch tests.

At the close of the examination, the magistrates asked Willard to recite the Lord’s Prayer. And that he proved unable to do. Parris reported that “he stumbled at the threshhold,” then that he “mist” several other phrases on later attempts. Willard “laught” nervously, commenting, “it is a strange thing, I can say it at another time. I think I am bewitcht as well as they,” and finally declaring, “it is these wicked ones that do so overcome me.” Hathorne kept pressing Willard to confess, pointing out to him, “there is also the jury of inquest for murder that will bear hard against you.” But Willard refused. “If it was the last time I was to speak I am innocent,” he insisted.

On that busy May 18, the magistrates questioned and ordered held one more suspect in addition to Willard and the other five men and women whose examinations had originally been scheduled for the day before. The record of the interrogation of Dr. Roger Toothaker of Billerica and Beverly has not survived, but a deposition drawn up two days later revealed why he must have become a suspect. Toothaker, the only male medical practitioner to be accused of witchcraft in seventeenth-century New England, had practiced countermagic. A year earlier, Roger had boasted that “his Daughter had kild a witch” through a method he had taught her—filling an “Earthen pott” with an afflicted person’s urine and placing it “stopt . . . very Close” in “a hott oven” overnight. At about the same time, Toothaker had also diagnosed two “strangly sick” children, one from Salem and one from Beverly, as being “under an Evill hand.” The second of those afflicted youngsters, an unnamed child of Philip White of Beverly, was the niece or nephew of Sir William Phips.
³⁶

Hathorne and Corwin took another step that day as well: ordering Mary Towne Easty freed from custody.
³⁷
(Perhaps their colleagues on the new council had urged them to release people about whose guilt they were less than certain.) Goody Easty, unlike her sisters, had not been named by any confessors, nor had any of the afflicted reported being tormented by her specter since her examination almost a month earlier. A few fragmentary references suggest that all but one of the core group had retracted accusations of Mary Easty.

The exception was Mercy Lewis, who within twenty-four hours after Easty’s discharge began suffering “very Dreadfull” fits at the home of Constable John Putnam Jr., her master’s cousin. Late in the evening of May 19, Putnam and Marshal George Herrick concluded that Mercy “could not continue long in this world without A mittigation of thoes Torments.” About dawn they left her to go into town to file a new formal complaint and to ask Hathorne to issue a second warrant for the arrest of Goody Easty.

Throughout the day on May 20, other afflicted teenagers and children, singly and in pairs, came to view the tormented maidservant, as did many other Villagers. First Walcott, then Putnam Jr. and Williams, and finally Hubbard all attested that they saw Easty’s specter torturing Mercy. Lewis herself was “speachless” and “in a dase” most of the day, but according to Walcott, Easty’s apparition “put a chane aboute her nick and choaked her.” According to Ann Jr. and Abigail, the specters of John Willard and Mary Witheridge joined Easty’s in attacking the victim. Edward Putnam later described Mercy’s condition: “for all most the space of two days and a night she was choked allmost to death in so much we thought sumtimes she had banded her mouth and teath shut and all this very often untell shuch [
sic
] time as we under stood mary easty was laid in Irons.” On May 23, the magistrates again examined the reimprisoned Goody Easty. The record of that interrogation is no longer extant, but most of the afflicted seem to have once again complained against her. Essentially single-handedly, Mercy Lewis had prevented Easty from being freed, a development that underscores her leadership of the sufferers.