In the Devil's Snare (29 page)
On July 12, William Stoughton signed a death warrant for the five women convicted by the court at its second session. Exactly a week later, on Tuesday the 19th, they were all hanged on Salem’s Gallows Hill. At the execution, Calef later wrote, the Reverend Mr. Noyes urged Sarah Good to confess, telling her “she was a Witch, and she knew she was a Witch.” But Good, cursing him as she once had cursed Mercy Short, called him a “lyer,” insisting “I am no more a Witch than you are a Wizard, and if you take away my Life, God will give you Blood to drink.”
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The next day, a group of John Alden’s acquaintances observed a fast at his house in Boston “upon his account.” Samuel Willard prayed, as did James Allen (minister of the First Church) and Joshua Scottow. Samuel Sewall read a sermon, and Cotton Mather sang “the first part” of Psalm 103, presumably the verses that praised God’s many blessings, emphasized his forgiveness of sins, and declared that he “redeemeth thy life from destruction.” The point was not to proclaim Alden’s innocence but rather to decline to judge him guilty and instead to implore God to help him to “Learn the
Lessons
” of the “hard . . . school” to which God had allowed the devil to consign him.
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By mid-July, the Court of Oyer and Terminer was slowly and carefully working its way through the accumulated backlog of witchcraft cases. New complaints kept trickling in, but the executions of six convicted witches appeared to have had the desired effect, for the number of reported afflictions had been greatly reduced. The judges could reasonably have expected matters to continue in the same vein over the next few months, although they might equally have anticipated difficult decisions in the future. (Newton, after all, had chosen to prosecute first those defendants who seemed most likely to be easily convicted, primarily “usual suspects.”) Yet soon the crisis took a very different turn, one that first would cause it to expand swiftly, then ultimately to collapse with nearly equivalent speed.
FRANCIS HOOKE AND CHARLES FROST (KITTERY) TO SIR WILLIAM PHIPS, JUNE 30, 1692
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We would not have been soe bould as to have troubled your excelency with those rude lines, but that we are constrayned to it by the late and continuall out crys of that small handfull of people yett remayning in this poore country; whos constant fears ar such as they they are in continuall expectation of being destroyed and cannot beleeve any thinge less consideringe our circumstances exept your excellency out of pure care & pitty will be pleased for to take some speedy measures to strengthen our hands agaynst the comon enemy which we expect dayly to be upon us agayne a discovery of which we have almost every day, soe as that we dare not adventure from our houses about our familly concerns, but with the hazard of our lives, . . . [We] doe tak it for granted that the Indions are not farr from us; besids all we are informed that the french & Indions are sertaynly gathering into a head for to com this way on us & how soon we cannot say: all these things have put such fears on our people in each towne that they are redy to take winge.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Burroughs Their Ringleader
JULY 15–SEPTEMBER 8, 1692
EVEN THOUGH THE PACE of witchcraft accusations appeared to have slowed in mid-July, events in an Essex County port town demonstrated that the climate of fear producing those complaints had not vanished, thereby presaging the continuation of the crisis. With the memory of the assault on Wells a month earlier fresh in their minds, the people of Gloucester endured a demonic attack.
It began when the family of Ebenezer Babson heard noises around their house “almost every Night.” They saw men running away and discerned voices discussing a possible assault. After moving to a nearby fortified house for safety, the Babsons and their neighbors heard men “Stamping and running, not far from the Garrison” night after night. Once Ebenezer thought he saw two Frenchmen, “one of them having a Bright Gun upon his Back, and both running at a great pace towards him”; at other times, he and others believed they spotted Indians. For more than two weeks, Gloucester militiamen had regular encounters with shadowy figures who melted away into the swamps and forests when shot at. On July 18, a troop of sixty men arrived from Ipswich to help them combat “these inexplicable Alarms,” but after another week had passed the Gloucester folk concluded that the attackers were spectral rather than real. The local minister, John Emerson, maintained that “the Devil and his Agents were the cause of all the Molestation,” a viewpoint with which Cotton Mather tended to concur. The “Ambushments against the Good People of Glocester,” he observed, could well have been caused by “Dæmons, in the Shape of Armed Indians and Frenchmen.” These incidents thus would constitute “a Prodigious piece of the Strange Descent from the Invisible World, then made upon other parts of the Country.” Like Joseph Ring of Salisbury, the residents of Gloucester found themselves surrounded by malevolent forces impossible to combat.
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As the invisible world was assaulting Gloucester, its manifestations also continued to appear elsewhere. One evening in mid-July in Salem Town, for example, a man thought he saw the apparition of Ann Pudeator as he walked along the street. “In a moment of time she pasid by me as swifte as if a burd flue by me,” he indicated; the specter then disappeared into Pudeator’s house. In Andover, Joseph Ballard, whose wife Elizabeth had been sick for several months, decided that her illness might have been caused by witchcraft. Taking a course of action followed previously by members of the Wilkins and Putnam families in similar situations, he recruited two of the afflicted Salem Villagers as witch-finders, probably returning home with them on July 14. No contemporary source clearly identifies these young women, but they most likely were Mercy Lewis and Betty Hubbard, both of whom had earlier engaged in successful witch-finding, and who are recorded as having viewed Elizabeth Ballard and having named her spectral attackers at an unspecified time. The two youthful Villagers initiated what would be the final, dramatic phase of the witchcraft crisis.
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THE CRISIS BROADENS
Although the surviving evidence is incomplete, the witch-finders appear to have named as Elizabeth Ballard’s afflicters a seventy-two-year-old widow, Ann Foster, her forty-year-old daughter, Mary Lacey Sr., and her eighteen-year-old granddaughter, Mary Lacey Jr. When the widow Foster was examined in Salem Village over a three-day period ( July 15, 16, and 18), she readily confessed her involvement with witchcraft, explaining that Martha Allen Carrier had recruited her into the diabolic ranks six years earlier. The devil had come to her several times in the shape of a bird, she disclosed, all the while promising her “prosperity,” but Goody Carrier had warned that “if she would not be awitch the divill should tare her in peices and Cary her away.” Foster acknowledged bewitching a hog and using poppets to kill or injure several children at Martha’s request. She also admitted accompanying Carrier to a witch meeting in Salem Village about two months before. “Ther [I] did see mr Burroughs the minister who spake to them all,” Ann recounted, further indicating that “she hard some of the witches say that their was three hundred & five in the whole Country, & that they would ruin that place the Vilige.”
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After giving Foster time to reflect on this confession, the magistrates visited her at the Salem prison, where she reconfirmed her statement in the presence of John Hale. Responding to Hale’s additional inquiries, she offered homely details of the spectral gathering. She had “carried Bread and Cheese in her pocket” to the Village, where she and the other Andover participants “sat down together under a tree and eat their food” before the meeting started. Goody Foster also expressed her belief that Burroughs and Carrier were planning to kill her. Because she had confessed and exposed them, she explained, their specters had appeared to her armed with “a sharp pointed iron like a spindle, but four square, and threatned to stab her to death with it.” A month later, when Hale called again at the prison, Foster reiterated the same fear.
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On Wednesday, July 20, in a confession no longer extant, Mary Lacey Sr. admitted to four Essex County magistrates—Hathorne, Corwin, Gedney, and John Higginson, son of the Salem Town minister—that she too had attended the Salem Village witch meeting, traveling on a pole with her mother and Goody Carrier.
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The following day, she described seeing Elizabeth Howe and Rebecca Nurse (both hanged two days earlier) and Mistress Mary Bradbury being “Baptised by the old Serpent at newburry falls” about two years previously. She also conceded that she had afflicted both Elizabeth Ballard and Timothy Swan, another Andover resident then suffering from a mysterious illness. And she disclosed that Martha Carrier’s sons Richard (age eighteen) and Andrew (age sixteen) were numbered among the local witches.
Of the three related women, the most voluble confessor proved to be Mary Lacey Jr., who offered the magistrates considerable detail about local diabolic activities. The teenager acknowledged that she had afflicted Goody Ballard and Goodman Swan, and that she rode on a pole to the Village witch meeting, where she recognized George Burroughs and saw Satan as “a black man” with “a high crowned hat.” The devil, she indicated, had exhorted them all to “make more witches if we can & says if we will not make other persons sett there hand to the Book he will tear us in peaces.” She agreed with her mother that Andrew and Richard Carrier were involved in bewitching others. Richard, she disclosed, had attended the Village meetings with her. Because Andrew Carrier had been beaten by his master, he and his brother were currently afflicting his master’s child.
“Why would they hurt the Village people?” the magistrates asked Mary. “The Divill would sett up his Kingdome their & we should have happy days,” the girl replied, going on to describe the devil’s sacrament at the Village. (She had some difficulty with the color of the bread, at first calling it “brownish,” but later adding, probably in response to an unrecorded leading question, that some of it “look’t of a Reddish Color.”) The justices took the opportunity of having a willing witness to inquire about a number of matters that concerned them, some specific and some general. How many people had Martha Carrier bewitched to death? Mary readily named seven—men, women, children. How had Goody Carrier killed them? “She Stabbed them to the hart with pinns needles & knitting needles,” both “on there bodye[s]” and through the use of poppets, the confessor explained. “Doe you hear the Divel hurts in the Shap of any person without there consents?” the magistrates asked, responding to the concerns expressed the previous month by Samuel Willard and other clergymen. “No,” Mary replied, obligingly. “When any person Striks with a Sword or Staf at a Spirit or Spector will that hurt the body?” “Yes,” came the answer, equally obliging, and with it the further information that both her mother and her grandmother had been injured in that manner in the Village in recent months.
The magistrates, not surprisingly, expressed particular interest in George Burroughs and Martha Carrier. “Goody Carrier told me the Divell Said to her she should be a Queen in hell,” Mary revealed. And who would be king? the justices inquired. “The Minister,” the teenager replied. “What kind of Man Is Mr Burroughs?” Why, “a pretty little man and he has Come to Us Somtimes In his Spiritt in the Shape of a Catt & I think somtimes In his proper Shape.”
Mary Warren, present and afflicted during the examination, took the confessor’s hand without being hurt after she finished. “Mary Lacey did Ernestly ask Mary Warren Forgiveness for afflicting of her and both fell a weeping Together,” recorded the note-taker, describing what he must have thought an affecting scene. The magistrates then brought in Goody Lacey, whose daughter urged her to “repent and Cal upon God,” and finally Ann Foster, whom they accused of not being sufficiently forthcoming in her confessions thus far. She quickly supplied more useful information, confirming several of the deaths that her granddaughter had attributed to Martha Carrier. She further disclosed that Mary Allen Toothaker and her daughter, Martha Emerson, had attended the malefic gathering in Salem Village, where the Laceys and Foster had all signed the devil’s book, using a pen and red ink “like blood.” After Warren, in a fit, “Cried out Upon Richard Carrier,” the magistrates issued a warrant to arrest him and his brother.
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When they interrogated the Carriers on July 21 and 22, the justices at first found them uncooperative.
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Even though the Laceys, mother and daughter, confronted the young men, accusing them of assisting in the torture of Timothy Swan because of “Mrs. Bradberys account or quarrel She had with him,” and urging them to confess, Richard in particular was “Verry Obstinate.” But after the afflicted were “Grevously tormented,” the magistrates ordered Richard and Andrew carried into another room and bound “feet & hands.” When Richard returned “a Little while after,” he proved far more forthcoming. Readily describing Satan as a black man with a high-crowned hat, he admitted signing the devil’s “little Red” book by making a red mark in it and watching his brother do likewise (with their mother looking on). He had given Satan permission to afflict both Goody Ballard and Goodman Swan in his shape, and twice he had attended witch meetings in Samuel Parris’s pasture. “I heard Sarah Good talk of a minister or two,” Richard revealed; “one of them was he that had ben at the Estward & preached once at the Village, his name Is Burroughs and he Is a little man.” Among the others at the meeting were his uncle Roger Toothaker, who had died in prison in June, his aunt Mary, and his cousin Martha.
Asked to name additional attendees, Richard Carrier replied with a much longer list of participants than Goody Foster, her daughter or granddaughter, or his brother Andrew could supply. As someone who had undoubtedly visited his mother in jail during the nearly two months she had been imprisoned, he knew the names of other suspects, some of whom he had surely encountered in person. And so he identified many witches for the magistrates, including some who had been executed (Nurse, Howe, Bishop, Wilds) and some awaiting trial (Willard, the Proctors, the Coreys, Bradbury). He acknowledged having afflicted three people in Salem Village: Williams, Walcott, and Parris’s wife, Elizabeth. When Satan baptized him at Newbury Falls, the others with him included Nurse, Howe, and Bradbury. Goody Nurse had “handed the bread about” at the devil’s sacrament, where he drank the wine but did not eat. “The Divel told them they Should over Come & Prevail” when they signed his book, Richard declared. “The Ingagement was to afflict persons & over Come the Kingdome of Christ, & set up the Divels Kingdome & we were to have hapy Days.”
Just a day later, John Proctor and other (unnamed) imprisoned suspects wrote from the Salem jail to a group of Boston clergymen, charging that Richard and Andrew Carrier had been tortured to make them confess. The petitioners informed Increase Mather, Samuel Willard, James Allen, John Bailey (Allen’s assistant), and Joshua Moodey that the young men had been “tyed . . . Neck and Heels till the Blood was ready to come out of their Noses,” and that Proctor’s son William had earlier received the same treatment. Such actions, they charged, resembled “Popish Cruelties.” The judges, accusers, and jury had “Condemned us already before our Tryals, being so much incensed and engaged against us by the Devil.” They begged the ministers to attend their upcoming trials, “hoping thereby you may be the means of saving the shedding our Innocent Bloods.”
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How the five recipients of this missive responded is unknown. Samuel Willard had continued to preach his sermon cycle on 1 Peter 5:8 during July, but without the explicit references to the witchcraft crisis evident in his sermon of June 19. Instead, he phrased the later homilies generally, presenting his message in purely spiritual terms. Possibly the mid-June sermon aroused so much controversy he thereafter deliberately toned down his words and his actions, or perhaps he feared that another witchcraft accusation directed at him would not so immediately be rejected by the judges. If anyone took positive steps, it might well have been the Reverend Joshua Moodey. Himself a former resident of New Hampshire who had once been unlawfully imprisoned, and with a wife rumored to have been named as a witch in June, Moodey was probably the most likely of the group to sympathize with the prisoners’ plight. Indeed, he reportedly soon intervened in another case, as shall be seen shortly.
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The jailed petitioners also asked the ministers to endorse their “Humble Petition” to Governor William Phips. In that separate document, which no longer survives, they evidently asked to be tried in Boston, or alternatively “to have these Magistrates changed, and others in their rooms.” Knowing that Sir William had initially reprieved Rebecca Nurse (although he subsequently rescinded that action), they perhaps thought he would react positively to their complaints of mistreatment and their request for a change of venue or at least for different judges. But Governor Phips failed either to alter the composition of the court or to move the trials.
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The extent of the governor’s support for the trials has not been fully appreciated, because historians, misled by Phips’s subsequent attempts to distance himself from the proceedings, have erroneously believed that he spent most of the summer of 1692 in Maine. Yet surviving council minutes prove that Phips met regularly throughout June and July with the judges of the Court of Oyer and Terminer. Not every judge attended every council meeting, but Stoughton, Sewall, Winthrop, Richards, and Sergeant usually participated, and occasionally Gedney, Corwin, and Hathorne showed up as well. Therefore, Sir William must have been well informed about the progress of the witchcraft trials. For instance, at the July 4 council meeting (attended by Phips, Stoughton, Sewall, Winthrop, and Sergeant) the governor undoubtedly received a full report on the just-concluded second session of the court, and at the July 25 or 26 council meeting the same men, plus Richards, certainly discussed the prisoners’ July 23 petition. The futility of that plea for help becomes evident when one realizes that the men passing judgment on it were the judges and their council colleagues.
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To conclude that the governor and his councilors did
not
discuss the trials at such sessions would be to believe in a highly improbable, if not wholly impossible, absence of communication on a subject of pressing importance to everyone. That Phips, initially sympathetic to the request for a reprieve for Rebecca Nurse, wilted under pressure from the “Salem gentlemen,” and that he took no action in response to the Proctor petition, suggests his heavy reliance on his advisory council and his support for the Court of Oyer and Terminer’s conduct of the witchcraft prosecutions. The governor further demonstrated his complicity in the trials by perpetuating the same official silence about the crisis he had initiated in May. On July 21, Sir William Phips wrote to London without mentioning the trials or the unprecedented group execution of five women for witchcraft just two days before.
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John Proctor and his fellow prisoners were not the only alleged witches who reacted to the outcome of the court’s second session by seeking changes in their circumstances. Nathaniel Cary, whose wife Elizabeth had been jailed since late May, attended the trials in Salem, “to see how things were there managed.” When he saw that “Spectre-Evidence was there received, together with Idle, if not malicious Stories, against Peoples Lives,” he determined to take action. Enlisting others to help, he first petitioned William Stoughton to move his wife’s trial to their own Middlesex County. When that effort failed, he organized her successful escape on July 30, probably by bribing the Cambridge jailer. She traveled first to Rhode Island, where she eventually realized she was not safe from pursuit, and so she moved on to New York. In October her husband joined her, and that colony’s new governor, Benjamin Fletcher, was reportedly “very courteous” to them both.
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Philip and Mary English too fled from confinement at about the same time. Unlike Mistress Cary, they had not been jailed in chains but instead had been allowed to post bail and to have some freedom of movement in Boston as long as they stayed in the prison each night. The oral history handed down in their family implicated Samuel Willard and especially Joshua Moodey in their escape. One of their descendants reported that after inviting the Englishes to attend services at Old South, Moodey had preached on Matthew 10:23, “If they persecute you in one city, flee to another.” Later, he reputedly called on the couple in the Boston prison to ensure that they had grasped his meaning, informing them that he had “persuaded several worthy Persons in Boston, to make Provision for their Conveyance out of the Colony.” They took the opportunity thus offered, and—leaving two young daughters behind in Boston to board with friends—the Englishes ended up in New York, where, like the Carys, they were said to have been received warmly by the governor and other wealthy residents of the city.
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