In the Devil's Snare (35 page)

That Sabbath, the Village congregation voted “in public by a general consent” to excommunicate Goody Martha Corey. The following Wednesday, Parris, Nathaniel Putnam, and the two church deacons visited her in prison to inform her of the church’s action. They found her “very obdurate, justifying herself and condemning all that had done any thing to her just discovery or condemnation.” Her “imperiousness” would not permit them to have more than “a little discourse” with her, and she “was willing to decline” their prayer. So they pronounced “the dreadful sentence of excommunication,” and left.
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Some time between Monday, September 12, and Friday, September 16, several more accused witches escaped from custody in Boston. Edward and Sarah Bishop and John Alden broke out of jail, and Hezekiah Usher fled from house arrest to Rhode Island. Alden and Usher probably waited to learn the fate of Mistress Bradbury, another high-status defendant, before they took such a drastic step. Her conviction would have convinced them that, despite their prominence, they too had no chance of success in the Court of Oyer and Terminer. A letter describing their escape also remarked on the deaths of two Groton men at the hands of the Wabanakis and repeated a recent message from the northeastern frontier reporting that “our scouts” had located “about 80 or 100 Indians . . . in the night siting at thaire fires hammering of slugs for their gunns.” The scouts had come so close “they could see the Indians and heare them talke.” Samuel Parris was thus not the only Massachusetts resident who linked witches and the war in a single document in mid-September 1692.
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The court began its second week of proceedings on Tuesday, September 13, with a grand-jury session on the case of the Andover confessor Ann Foster, continuing the next day with her daughter Mary Lacey Sr. Since both women had confessed, that they would be indicted was obvious. Foster was formally charged with bewitching Hubbard and Walcott, Lacey with afflicting Hubbard and Lewis. Another confessor considered at the same time was Samuel Wardwell, who had actively participated in others’ examinations, urging them to confess. But he recanted, telling the grand jury on September 13 that his written confession “was: taken: from his mouth and that he had said it: but: he said he belyed: himselfe: he also said it was alone one: he: knew he should dye for it: whether he owned it or no.” The grand jury indicted Wardwell for bewitching Martha Sprague and for making a covenant with the devil. Clearly, the jury believed his initial confession, not his recantation.
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All three of these confessors were tried and convicted later in the week. No information survives about the Foster and Lacey trials; presumably, the women’s own confessions and the testimony of other confessors (primarily Andrew and Richard Carrier and Mary Toothaker) condemned them. According to Robert Calef, Samuel Wardwell’s confession and spectral evidence were marshaled against him at his trial. If a later remark by Cotton Mather is accurate, his confession included an otherwise unrecorded report that “at their Cheef Witch-meetings, there had been present some French canadians, and some Indian Sagamores to concert the methods of ruining New England.” Such a statement would surely have added to the credibility of the confession in the minds of the jurors and further confirmed for them the existence of a conspiracy of visible and invisible worlds.
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One other confessor also faced the judges that week: Abigail Dane Faulkner. As was previously noted, after refusing to confess on August 11, she had changed her story at the end of the month, admitting that she attended the witch meeting at Chandler’s garrison and that she consented to the devil’s torturing people for her. Both Village and Andover afflicted joined in describing their torments at her hands for the grand and petty juries. The grand jury indicted her for bewitching Sarah Phelps and Martha Sprague, and at her trial such confessors as Mary Barker and William Barker Sr. would have appeared against her. After she was convicted and sentenced to death, she pleaded pregnancy and was reprieved.
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The remaining cases that came before the Court of Oyer and Terminer at its final session involved people who had not confessed. The grand jury indicted Sarah Buckley and her daughter Mary Witheridge for tortures inflicted on several sufferers at their May 18 examinations, but they were not tried until January, at which point they were acquitted. Those defendants whose cases advanced past the indictment stage in September were not as fortunate. Wilmot Reed, Margaret Scott, and Mary Parker were all indicted and convicted during the second week of September. Parker could well have been found guilty solely on the testimony of the confessors William Barker Jr. and Mercy Wardwell, and on the words of those who said she had afflicted them, for no other documents survive in her case. The prosecutions of Reed and Scott are also sparsely documented, perhaps suggesting the haste with which the evidence against them was compiled. Four afflicted Villagers testified against Goody Reed; so did witnesses to a heated exchange between Reed and a Mistress Syms in Marblehead five years earlier, which people believed had resulted in Reed’s bewitching Syms. Goody Scott’s neighbors in Rowley, the evidence showed, had long thought her a witch. The afflicted people of Andover and Salem Village appear to have played only a limited role in her conviction.
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When the court adjourned on Saturday, September 17—until, it was thought, the first week of November—one piece of legal business remained unfinished. Giles Corey, indicted on the 9th, had when called up for his trial pleaded “not guilty,” but then refused to respond to the next ritual question: would he be tried by God and his country (that is, by a jury)? The traditional English punishment for such a failure to agree to a trial was called the
peine
forte et dure,
which directed placing heavy stones on a defendant’s prone body until he either entered a plea or died. Samuel Sewall recorded in his diary that “much pains was used with him two days, one after another, by the Court [including Sewall himself?] and Capt. Gardner of Nantucket who had been of his acquaintance: but all in vain.” On Sunday evening, then, everyone concerned understood that unless Corey changed his mind (or the magistrates relaxed their insistence that he formally agree to be tried) he would suffer a terrible death the next day.
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That night in Salem Village, Ann Putnam Jr. suffered “grievously,” her father soon reported to Judge Sewall. The witches assaulting her threatened that “she should be Pressed to Death, before Giles Cory.” But in the midst of “a little Respite” from her agonies, she saw an apparition in a “Winding Sheet.” The ghost told her that Corey “had Murdered him, by Pressing him to Death with his Feet; but that the Devil there appeared unto him, and Covenented with him, and promised him, He should not be Hanged.” Now, the ghost revealed, God had “Hardened” Corey’s heart so that he would not listen to the court and would die in the same way he had once killed another. Putnam informed Sewall that everyone in town had forgotten Giles Corey’s having beaten and kicked a servant to death in 1675 (before Ann was born), but that his daughter’s vision now caused people to “Remember [it] very well.” To Cotton Mather, who later included the story in
Wonders of the
Invisible World,
the tale constituted yet another confirmation of God’s providential intervention in human affairs and the validity of the spectral visions seen in the Village. To a modern reader, Ann’s experience seems rather an indication of the persistence of gossip. Putnam, after all, remarked in his letter that several of the jurors who had acquitted Corey were “yet alive.” They certainly had not forgotten the case, and they would have talked, at the time and more recently. And Ann had long since proved herself to be a remarkable collector of gossip.
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“About noon, at Salem, Giles Corey was press’d to death for standing Mute,” Sewall wrote on Monday, September 19. Robert Calef later revealed that Giles’s “Tongue being prest out of his Mouth, the Sheriff with his Cane forced it in again, when he was dying.” Historians have long speculated about the reasons for Corey’s dramatic act of defiance, but Calef’s initial explanation has as much validity as any: understanding that the jury had “cleared none upon Tryal,” and “knowing there would be the same Witnesses against him,” Giles Corey “rather chose to undergo what Death they would put him to.”
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Most of those condemned at the fourth session of the court were scheduled to hang on Thursday, September 22. At nearly the last minute, Dorcas Hoar confessed. John Hale, Nicholas Noyes, and two other ministers—with the endorsement of Bartholomew Gedney—wrote hastily to Boston on September 21 to ask that Goody Hoar be reprieved for a month. She had acknowledged “the heynous crime of witchcraft” and having signed the devil’s book. Dorcas, they indicated, also “gives account of some other persons that shee hath known to be guilty of the same crime.” Being in “grat distress of Conscience,” she “earnestly craves a little longer time of life to realize & perfect her repentance for the salvation of her soule,” the clergymen explained. Governor William Phips had again sailed for Pemaquid on the 16th, so Lieutenant Governor Stoughton responded to the petition, granting the requested reprieve and thus saving Dorcas Hoar from the gallows.
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Even though several confessors were among those convicted in September, only Samuel Wardwell, who had recanted, was included in the September 22 death warrant. The other seven people hanged that day were Martha Corey, Mary Easty, Alice Parker, Mary Parker, Ann Pudeator, Margaret Scott, and Wilmot Reed. Robert Calef has left the only account of the execution. When the cart carrying the group to the gallows “was for some time at a sett,” he wrote, the afflicted and other observers commented that “the Devil hindered it.” Goody Corey died after “an Eminent Prayer upon the Ladder,” and Mary Easty’s “last farewell” to her family drew “Tears from the Eyes of almost all present.” Calef, relaying eyewitness reports, termed Easty “as Serious, Religious, Distinct, and Affectionate as could well be exprest.” Nicholas Noyes, though, remained unmoved by the scene. “What a sad thing it is to see Eight Firebrands of Hell hanging there,” he exclaimed.
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THE DISSOLUTION OF THE COURT

Even before the executions, the critical voices first heard loudly in August continued to clamor for attention. On September 20, Cotton Mather described himself to Stephen Sewall as “continually b[eset?] with all sorts of Objections, and Objectors against the [torn] work now doing at Salem.” Consequently, he explained, he more than ever felt the urgent need to complete his book on witchcraft. Thus he dispatched “my most
importunate
request” for the trial records of perhaps as many as a dozen “principal witches” so that he could include summaries in the book. Please, he implored the court clerk, also send a letter in which you “intimate over again, what you have sometimes told me, of the awe which is upon the hearts of your juries, with [respect?] unto the validity of the spectral evidences,” and include “your observations about the confessors and [torn] the credibility of what they assert.” Mather underscored the importance of the request by pointing out that Governor Phips himself had directed him to ask Sewall for this information. “There are some of his circumstances with reference to this affayr, which I need not mention, that call for the Expediting of your Kindness,” the clergyman added cryptically. Two days later, he followed up the letter by discussing the publication project in person with Stoughton, Hathorne, Stephen Sewall, and the Reverend John Higginson at the home of the court clerk’s brother, Judge Sewall.
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To what “circumstances” involving the governor was Cotton Mather discreetly referring in his letter? Sir William Phips’s biographers point out that both the governor and his wife, Mary Spencer Phips, met some of the criteria that identified witches in 1692. Phips had consulted a fortune-teller, and had taken the resulting predictions very seriously; he was a successful treasure hunter, thus possibly implying access to occult knowledge; he and his wife both had extensive links to Maine and even to George Burroughs. One of their household servants (captured by Phips at Port Royal in 1690) was the daughter of Castine and the granddaughter of Madockawando. Moreover, Lady Mary Phips was related through her sister to a woman accused of witchcraft in the late 1650s, in an incident sufficiently well known that John Hale included it in the book on witchcraft he wrote in 1697. Lady Phips does indeed seem to have been named as a witch in 1692. Two critics of the trials claimed as much a decade later, and a pamphlet published in England in 1694 disclosed the possible precipitating factor. While Sir William was away (that is, either during the month after the first week of August, or between September 16 and 29), his wife apparently signed an order for the release of one of the accused female witches, which the jailer then obeyed. The pamphleteer wrote that he mistrusted the tale until he saw the “Discharge under the Keepers hand attested a true Copy.” For this act, the anonymous writer revealed, the jailer lost his job, “as he himself told me.”
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Sir William Phips could therefore have felt compelled to support the prosecutions to the greatest extent possible in order to protect himself and his wife from possible accusations. That, indeed, is the argument advanced by Phips’s biographers. In the absence of definitive evidence, it is impossible to determine the governor’s motivations with any certainty. But surviving documents make two things clear. First, contrary to many scholars’ assumptions, Phips was well informed about the trials and firmly supported them while they lasted. He also strongly encouraged Cotton Mather to defend them in print. But second, once public opinion turned sharply against the trials—a shift that had occurred by the second week in October—Phips quickly and successfully sought to disentangle himself from the proceedings.

The governor might even have sensed a new climate of opinion immediately upon his return from Pemaquid on September 29 after a brief absence of thirteen days. In the interim, of course, eight executions had taken place. In the unseemly rush to convict defendants during the final court session, people had been found guilty on the basis of evidence that failed to meet the standards set forth even by such defenders of the trials as Cotton Mather. Whereas previously Mather had contended that spectral testimony had been used to supply “presumptions” that led to investigations which then uncovered maleficium complaints, he could not argue the same with respect to the prosecutions of Martha Corey or Mary Parker. In addition, Mary Easty and Mary Bradbury (the latter condemned, but reprieved “from the intercession of some friends,” revealed Thomas Brattle) had presented strongly worded testimonials to their good character. Easty herself movingly petitioned Phips, the judges, and “the Reverend ministers” before her death, asking not for her own life but rather that “no more Innocentt blood may be shed.” She knew the judges “would not be gulty of Innocent blood for the world,” she wrote, but knowing herself to be innocent, “I know you are in the wrong way.” She asked that the accusers be questioned “strictly” and kept separated for “some time,” and that more of the confessors might be tried, “I being confident there is severall of them has belyed themselves and others.” How many people other than the addressees knew the contents of Easty’s petition is uncertain. But she touched on the very issues that outspoken critics were raising, and some of the “Reverend ministers” of Boston were indeed reflecting on the trials.
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Increase Mather, hitherto publicly silent on the subject, and Samuel Willard, sporadically vocal earlier in the summer, both prepared their own publications for the press that fall. Mather, deliberately linking himself to the Englishman John Gaule, who had urged caution in witchcraft prosecutions in his 1646
Select Cases of Conscience touching Witches and Witchcrafts,
gave his work a similar title:
Cases of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits Personating
Men.
Willard’s title,
Some Miscellany Observations on our present Debates
respecting Witchcrafts, in a Dialogue Between S. and B. By P. E. and J. A., presented the nominally anonymous author as a supporter of Philip English and John Alden
.
The incorrect publication information on the first page, “Philadelphia, Printed by William Bradford, for Hezekiah Usher, 1692,” summoned up the name of another fugitive member of Willard’s Third Church. Willard’s authorship of this pamphlet was well known to contemporaries; when Jacob Melijn sent a copy of it, along with
Cases of Conscience
and
Wonders of the Invisible World,
to a New York friend in late October, he identified it as “a dialogue by Mr. Willard.”
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Historians have debated the relative influence of these two publications and have argued about whether they helped to effect the dissolution of the court. The works may have seen print too late to have influenced the governor’s decision in that form, but on the other hand both reflected the thinking of prominent and influential Bostonians in late September and early October 1692. In addition, they seem to have circulated in manuscript prior to their publication, as did the preface that Willard drafted for
Cases of Conscience
. Also available in manuscript during the same period was a lengthy “letter” to an unnamed clergyman written on October 8 by Thomas Brattle, the wealthy merchant who belonged to Willard’s Third Church. All three works can thus be used to expose the nature of the discussions that led to the end of the primary phase of the trials.
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Although Increase Mather and Samuel Willard presented their positions in varying formats and adopted different argumentative styles, both focused on similar issues: Could the devil appear in the shape of an innocent person? Were touch tests reliable? What evidence would be required to convict a witch? What uses, if any, could be made of confessions and of the spectral visions of the afflicted people? And just as the ministers concurred on the key questions, so too they largely concurred on the answers. Starting from the premises that devils and witches existed and that Satan could afflict humans with or without the assistance of witches, Willard and the senior Mather insisted that the images of innocents
could
be represented to others by the devil, that touch tests constituted “the Devil’s testimony,” and that the afflicted people’s evidence had a “Diabolical” rather than an “Authentick” origin. Indeed, the afflicted might be possessed or obsessed rather than bewitched, which rendered their testimony even more doubtful. The only way to convict a witch, Mather wrote, was by “a free and Voluntary Confession of the Crime made by the Person Suspected and Accused After Examination,” or “if two credible Persons shall affirm upon Oath that they have seen the Party accused speaking such words, or doing things which none but such as have Familiarity with the Devil ever did or can do.” Confessions that named other witches were, however, unreliable. So Willard asserted, “If people have by their own account given themselves up to the Devil, the Father of Lies, . . . what Credit is to be given to the Testimony of such against the Lives of others?”
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Despite their criticism of the ideas and methods used to convict the witches in the trials, Willard and Mather nevertheless declined to find fault with the judges and jurors who had applied touch tests and accepted spectral testimony as reliable. (The men in question, after all, were members of their congregations, their friends and associates.) Willard dealt with the issue by wholly ignoring it. For his part, Mather insisted that if an innocent person were condemned—not that any
had
been, he added quickly—Satan’s “deluding and Imposing on the Imaginations of men” caused the injustice, and “the Witnesses, Juries, and Judges were all to be excused from blame.”
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In an unpaginated afterword to his tract, inserted at the last minute to gloss over differences with his son’s nearly simultaneous production of
Wonders of the Invisible World,
Increase went even further, terming the “Worthy Persons” who had been involved with the trials “wise and good men” who had “acted with all Fidelity according to their Light.” They deserved New Englanders’ “Pitty and Prayers” rather than “Censures.” Moreover, he pointed out, “the Judges affirm that they have not Convicted any one meerly on the account of what
Spectres
have said, or of what has been Represented to the Eyes or Imaginations of sick bewitched persons.” He then appended his own approbation of the conviction of George Burroughs at the only proceeding he had attended in person. As was indicated previously, in Increase Mather’s opinion the descriptions of Burroughs’s unusual strength met his test for convincing proof: witnesses had seen him “do such things as no man that has not a Devil to be his Familiar could perform.”

Thomas Brattle began his manuscript in a similar vein, claiming that he did not intend to “cast dirt on authority, or any way offer reproach to it,” but he quickly shifted to a hard-hitting critical analysis.
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His prose was less restrained and more impassioned than that of his clerical contemporaries, his critique more wide-ranging than theirs. Brattle, who later became a fellow of the Royal Society, took a more secular, scientifically oriented approach to the problem of witchcraft than did the ministers, while still not questioning the existence of Satan or his human allies. He too rejected touch tests and charged that afflicted and confessors alike consorted dangerously with the devil. But he also raised other troubling questions, and he named names. If they believed everything the accusers said, why had the judges never ordered the arrest of Mistress Margaret Thacher? Why had they allowed Hezekiah Usher to remain in “a private house” rather than jailing him? Why had they not vigorously pursued the high-status fugitives Elizabeth Cary, Philip and Mary English, John Alden? Already, he claimed, the husbands of some of the Andover confessors realized that they had erred when they pressed their wives to confess, and they deeply regretted their “rashnesse and uncharitablenesse” in doing so. To the list of distinguished judges and councilors supporting the trials he counterposed a list of equally distinguished (but publicly silent) critics: the former governor Simon Bradstreet, the former deputy governor Thomas Danforth, the one-time judge of the Court of Oyer and Terminer Nathaniel Saltonstall, and several Boston justices of the peace.

Brattle singled out his own pastor, Samuel Willard, for special praise. As the minister to three of the judges, Brattle declared, Willard had been “very solicitous and industrious in this matter,” and if his “notions and proposals” had only been adopted at the outset of the troubles, “they would never have grown unto that heigth which now they have.” What Willard’s strategy for dealing with the crisis would have been, Brattle did not reveal, but he gave some possible clues in his lengthy discussion of the way the young Willard had handled his obsessed maidservant Elizabeth Knapp two decades before. “I often think of the Groton woman,” Brattle wrote, asserting that there was as much reason to arrest and jail those she accused then as there was to arrest and jail others now. Yet Knapp had later admitted “that all was mere fancy and delusion of the Devill’s.” That nothing came of her false charges, Brattle implied but did not say, stemmed from Willard’s dealing with her afflictions in a spiritual rather than legal manner and from his skepticism about the statements she made in her fits. Perhaps, then, Willard made a similar proposal about treating the Salem Village afflicted early in the crisis.
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In addition to forcefully critiquing the trials, Thomas Brattle’s letter inadvertently revealed the extent of continuing support for the proceedings in Salem. A rising chorus of voices had been raised against the court, but Brattle also referred repeatedly (if briefly) to the court’s multitude of advocates he and his allies were opposing. “The great cry of many of our neighbours” insisted on the truthfulness of the confessions, he acknowledged. Those skeptical of witch-finding by the afflicted had not been able to influence the credulous, he admitted. Unfortunately, Brattle wrote, Samuel Willard “has as yet mett with little but unkindness, abuse, and reproach from many men,” and the judges have been “apt to speak very hardly” of their critics. The dissension depicted in such statements accords well with Governor Phips’s characterization of the atmosphere in Boston in early October as a “strange ferment of dissatisfaction,” replete with “Passion” and with the possibility of “kindling an inextinguishable flame” or with Cotton Mather’s description of “Animosity” and “Paroxysms” of rage “Embroiling” the town.
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