Evidently, John Cannon did not regard Newtonianism as having made the heavens unsuitable for predictions. To be sure, he was slightly self-conscious about his taste for augury, confessing himself “on certain occasions to be somewhat superstitiously given to the art,” but he never mentioned any scientific or rational objections to it.37 Cannon could be dismissive of some who shared his passion for prognostication, like Samuel Downton, “an old sophistical fellow pretending surgery, philosophy, astrology &c.”38 Yet on the whole he did not judge the Somerset folk around him to be particularly backward or ignorant. Cannon might not have been unwilling to see himself as enlightened: after all, he thought for himself, came to his own conclusions, read widely and took advantage of every opportunity to learn about the world. He even expressed a passing interest in Freemasonry, although he never joined a lodge.39 He would probably have been astonished if anyone had informed him that astrology, augury and occult science had been outmoded and debunked by an enlightened age.
Cannon's outlook, like Campbel's and Crowther's, was in large measure a survival from the seventeenth century, when critical inquiry and occult philosophy were more congenial partners. By the mid-eighteenth century, occult thinking was no longer respectable or fashionable among the learned elite, but Cannon did not move in such august circles. The print culture that he appropriated, through pamphlets, chapbooks, periodicals and newspapers, gave him no reason to question his acceptance of occult beliefs, and even supported the assumption that his attitudes were compatible with modern trends. Cannon personified, with remarkable accuracy, the “enchanted world” that was imagined by Defoe in his works on the occult, and he even shared some of Defoe's opinions of that world: that the Devil was at work in it, that visions and apparitions were potentially beneficial, that magicians served Satan even when they imagined otherwise. This occult outlook may have been under threat at the universities or among the “wits” of the Royal Society, but John Cannon was blissfully unaware of it.
The Witchcraft Act: A Turning Point?
John Cannon lived through the passage of the celebrated Witchcraft Act of 1736. Could he possibly have had nothing to say about it? In fact, he ignored it entirely. Like Daniel Defoe, he did not have much to say about witchcraft itself either. Two incidents mentioned in his chronicle indicate that he accepted its reality, but they do not demonstrate any desire to revive the persecutions of the past. In October 1736, only a few months after the new law went into effect, “a strange & sudden hurricane of wind and rain” swept through Glastonbury. People said it was “conjuring weather,” meaning it had been caused by a witch. Indeed, one Margaret Dewdney of Glastonbury, “who was suspected naughty” (that is, of being a witch), had reputedly put a curse on a local farmer for refusing her “a pig's innard.” Being unable to make milk or cheese thereafter, the farmer asked Dr Bathurst of Devizes in Wiltshire, presumably a cunning-man, to raise the Devil in order to reveal who had brought this affliction upon him. The Devil duly appeared, occasioning the tremendous storm. When he vanished, the doctor beheld “the representation of 2 women & one man,” the true perpetrators of the curse.40
This was as much a story of ritual magic as of witchcraft. Under the witchcraft statute passed under James I in 1604, which condemned necromancy, the good doctor was just as guilty of diabolism as Margaret Dewdney or her associates, and just as liable to face capital punishment. The identification of the culprits, however, seems to have brought the case to an end. No attempt was made to punish them. Four years later, Cannon recorded a second case of sorcery, which had a similar outcome. After an argument with a female customer, a saddler named William West of Street felt uneasy and unable to drink. On his way home through Glastonbury, he “was by an invisible hand hurried into the abbey over gates, stiles, rubbish & the ruinated walls.” Arriving home, he saw in his room the same customer with whom he had quarrelled. He consulted “a certain woman,” probably a village wise woman, who burned his fingernails and a lock of his hair in a piece of paper, “which they pretended a remedy & cure for witchcraft.” Apparently, it worked, although West's head was twisted backwards in the course of the cure. Cannon acknowledged that there were many opinions about what had happened, but in his view West was “overlooked, bewitched or the Devil was in him.”41
In both of these instances, the concern of the victim was to end the effects of witchcraft, not to inflict justice on the witch. This reaction was not conditioned by the recent Witchcraft Act; rather, it reflected the long-term decline of witch prosecutions. The magical methods used to end the enchantment, however, were in both cases just as criminal under the 1604 legislation as witchcraft itself, and they actually remained criminal after 1736. Apparently, rural people had learned by the mid-eighteenth century how to deal with witch cases on their own, without the assistance of magistrates, but their solutions distinguished “good” from “bad” conjuring in ways that were sanctioned neither by the old law nor by the new. The stories in Cannon's chronicle help to explain why the Witchcraft Act did not evoke a greater response from the public: they were already used to sidestepping its provisions.
The Act of 1736 undermined the reality of witchcraft by repealing all previous English and Scottish legislation that criminalized it. Instead, penalties were to be levied “for the more effectual preventing and punishing of any Pretences to such Arts or Powers as are before mentioned, whereby ignorant Persons are frequently deluded and defrauded.” Anyone convicted of pretending “to exercise or use any kind of Witchcraft, Sorcery, Inchantment, or Conjuration, or [who] undertake to tell Fortunes, or pretend from his or her Skill or Knowledge in any occult or crafty Science, to discover where or in what manner any Goods or Chattels, supposed to have been stolen or lost, may be found,” was to be imprisoned for a year and pilloried at four consecutive market days.42 If the Act had been strictly enforced, it might have revealed a great deal about popular beliefs, giving historians an insight into the vexed question of how much interplay there was between popular magic and occult thinking or “crafty Science,” which for the first time in any English or Scottish witchcraft law is specifically identified as criminal.
Some thought that the new Act should be strictly enforced. A writer in the London Journal in April 1738, for example, blasted fortune-tellers as deserving of prosecution: “Whoever consults one of these blind Oracles, whether in Jest or in Earnest, with a Desire of knowing, or without, willfully puts himself out of God’s Providence, and by this very Act, becomes an Outlaw with respect to his Creator.” Such people are “Dealers in Superstition.” Two popular types of fortune-telling are specifically mentioned: namely, “a Tirewoman's shuffling a Pack of Cards, or poking in the Bottom of a Coffee-Cup.” The writer duly praised the 1736 Act, which “inflicts very high Pains on these Impostors.”43 Yet only a handful of fortune-tellers are known to have been prosecuted under the Act in the eighteenth century.
Perhaps the Act was never intended to be used in this way. From the first, it had been a political measure, calculated to strengthen Whig Party solidarity rather than to reform existing abuses. When it was passed in 1735, the Whig government of Sir Robert Walpole was floundering. Walpole was forced to accommodate his party's restless backbenchers in order to maintain a majority in the House of Commons. The result was a spate of religious and moral legislation that pleased old-fashioned Whigs and horrified Tories.44 The Witchcraft Bill was relatively uncontroversial, however, because witch prosecutions had effectively ceased. The only recorded opposition to it in the House came from James Erskine of the Grange, a Scottish Tory (although a Presbyterian in religion) and brother to the earl of Mar, leader of the Scottish Jacobite rebellion of 1715. His “long, canting speech” reportedly “set the House in a titter of laughter.” Erskine may have been dull, but he was certainly knowledgeable about the subject, as the library at his house near Prestonpans contained “a large collection of books on dæmonologia, which was Grange's [i.e. Erksine's] particular study.”45
Erskine spoke for a considerabl
e body of opinion within Scottish Presbyterianism. As late as 1743, the “Seceders” of the Associate Presbytery, who had split from the established Kirk over issues of doctrine and patronage, expressed the view that the Witchcraft Act was “contrary to the express law of God.”46 Without doubt, this opinion was shared by many mainstream Presbyterians as well. They adhered to the established view that witchcraft was the work of the Devil.47 The polite culture of the Edinburgh elite, however, was already departing from these pious notions. The best-known Scottish witch of this period was a theatrical character, Mausy in Alan Ramsay's comedy of 1727, The Gentle Shepherd. Her reputation for witchcraft was as dreadful as any Presbyterian minister could envisage:
She can o'ercast the night, and cloud the moon,
And mak the deils obedient to her crune.48
In reality, Mausy was merely a clever woman who knew the secrets of the village. She neither worshipped the Devil nor made magical effigies of her enemies. Strict Presbyterians may have been appalled by Ramsay's laxity, but hardly surprised, as the playwright was an Episcopalian, tainted by contact with Jacobite friends and freethinking ideas.
In the Highlands, where Presbyterianism was on the march against its Episcopal and Catholic enemies, the fearsome image of the witch remained real long after 1736. The English military engineer Edward Burt, who served in Scotland around 1730 and published a series of letters on his experiences, recounted the “ridiculous stories and imaginations” attached to a certain hill near Inverness: “the Fairies within it are innumerable, and Witches find it the most convenient Place for their Frolics and Gambols in the Night-time.” It was the witches, not the fairies, who commanded Burt's scornful attention. He complained that while “the Notion of Witches is pretty much worn out among People of any tolerable Sense or Education in England … here it remains even among some that sit judicially; and Witchcraft and Charming (as it is called) make up a considerable Article in the recorded Acts of the General Assembly [of the Kirk].” With disgust, Burt recounted the execution of the last Scottish witch, who had reportedly been burned in a pitch barrel at Dornoch in Sutherland as recently as 1727.49 When a Presbyterian minister tried to convince Burt of the reality of witchcraft, he retorted with the argument that “the Woman of Endor was only an Impostor, like our Astrologers or Fortune-tellers, and not a Witch in the present Acceptation of the Word.”50 Like so many English colonizers around the world, Burt was determined not to surrender his superior rationality to the blind ignorance of the natives.
At least Burt was willing to admit, reluctantly, that popular violence against suspected witches might occur in Hertfordshire as much as in the Highlands. In fact, it was far more likely to be seen in southern England. While several cases of witch-mobbing, or crowd attacks on suspected witches, occurred there between 1736 and 1760, none has been documented in Scotland.51 In England, the practice of “swimming” a witch was relatively common. It consisted of throwing a tied-up suspect into water to determine whether he or she would innocently sink or float like a witch—rejected by the water as she had rejected her own baptism. Witches were “swum” in 1737 at Oakley, Bedfordshire; in 1748 at Monk's Eleigh, Suffolk; in 1751 at Tring, Hertfordshire; in 1760 at Great Glen and Burton Overy, Leicestershire, as well as at Wilton, Wiltshire. An attempt to “swim” two women at Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire, in 1751 was foiled by the intervention of some gentlemen.52 This brutal procedure, peculiar to southern England, had begun almost a century before 1736. It was not a response to the Parliamentary Act.
The long history of “swimming” in his parish was lamented by the Reverend Joseph Juxon, rector of Twyford, Leicestershire, in a sermon given shortly after the passage of the Witchcraft Act. Juxon argued that, while the ancient witches were idolaters who deserved death, “modern Notions of Witchcraft … have no other Foundation than Ignorance or Superstition.”53 In spite of Reverend Juxon, a good portion of the English rural populace held to “modern Notions of Witchcraft,” which had more to do with fear of malevolent old people than with horror at diabolism. The relative complacency of John Cannon's Somerset neighbours seems admirable by comparison with the incidents of “swimming,” although West Countrymen might also perhaps have been pushed to vengeance against a “naughty” person under the right circumstances. In rural Scotland, the lack of violence against witches may indicate that the machinations of the Devil were still receiving attention from clerical authorities. The Pittenweem case of 1705 showed what could happen when a Scottish crowd became convinced that the magistrates and the clergy were not doing their duty against the instruments of Satan.
The reaction of the English press to the 1736 Witchcraft Act was muted, to say the least. The only published opposition to it came in the guise of a reprint of a 1679 pamphlet by the infamous Titus Oates, which aimed at conflating witchcraft with Roman Catholicism. The anonymous preface to the work vindicated the existence of good and evil spirits, rehearsed the biblical passages demonstrating the reality of witchcraft and argued that “Endorian Witches” were still active. The author granted nonetheless that previous legislation against conjuring was too severe, as it would “punish with Death a poor Hocus-Pocus Vagrant.”54 In response, John Wagstaffe's Discourse on Witchcraft was republished, with a preface accusing the opponents of the Act of being “Heathens … as their Opinion implies a Plurality of Gods, by attributing omnipotent Effects to more than one.”55 Apart from these works and a few brief mentions in newspapers, the usually cacophonous English press was silent.
Over the ensuing decades, a number of Anglican clergymen, many of them in the West Country, would register their disapproval of the Act in journals or private conversations, but none of them launched a public attack on it.56 Famously, the evangelical leader John Wesley, who believed his family home in Lincolnshire had been haunted by an evil spirit, penned a “solemn protest” against “giving up witchcraft,” which he considered “in effect giving up the Bible.” This was written, however, in May 1768, as part of a journal not meant for publication. Moreover, the circumstances of the entry, which are described in the next chapter, had to do with apparitions, not witchcraft.57 Most critics of the Witchcraft Act were probably more concerned about the effect it might have on spiritual beliefs than they were about prosecuting witches. They might even have concurred with Defoe's statement that the age of witches was long since past. The Act of 1736 simply acknowledged that reality. It was no turning point.
Mystics and Magia
Throughout the eighteenth century, popular magical beliefs remained in contact with an occult tradition that seems to have been almost defunct among the learned. In some cases, ordinary people reinvented the occult in terms that might have shocked seventeenth-century alchemists or astrologers. The mystical movement known as the French Prophets, for example, maintained that possession by spirits fulfilled divine intentions and was not always diabolical. The peculiar supernatural quality of their visionary experiences attracted the attention of alchemists as well as devotees of Jacob Boehme, and would influence the early Methodists. Spirit possession later became a feature of occult societies, eventually spinning off into the nineteenth-century Spiritualist movement, although its most unexpected impact was on the development of psychology. The French Prophets and their allies illustrate the reformulation of an occult tradition by men and women who were far outside the intellectual establishment.
Mysticism was a pan-European phenomenon of the period. It may seem incongruous to think of the first half of the eighteenth century as an era of mystical flowering, but in many parts of Europe it was. In France and the Low Countries, the disciples of Antoinette Bourignon (who died in 1680) and Jeanne Guyon (who lived until 1717) practised devotions shaped by the visions and personalities of these two remarkable female religious leaders. Societies of ecstatic visionaries or convulsionnaires sprang up in Paris during the 1730s. In Germany, mysticism flourished as an offshoot of Pietism, an introspective and disciplined form of Lutheranism. The most celebrated Pietist mystic was Count
Zinzendorf, who drew on the example of the English Philadelphians as he set about reviving the sect of the Moravian Brethren.58 Mystics, however, were not necessarily advocates of occult thinking. The desire for union with the godhead usually had more to do with negation of the self than with claiming supernatural wisdom or power. It was usually far removed from the philosophies of nature that were associated with the occult. Nonetheless, some varieties of mysticism, particularly those that relied on spontaneous experience, converged with occult thinking on a central point: namely, that human beings could become vessels for benevolent spirits. This allowed direct conversation with God as well as with the angels—a supernatural exchange that resulted in divine knowledge.
The largest British mystical movement in the early eighteenth century was the French Prophets, who generated a brief sensation and left a long, tangled legacy. Prophets declaring the imminent end of the world had arisen among the beleaguered French Protestants of the mountainous Cévennes region in the 1670s. Inspired by millenarian hopes and driven to desperate opposition by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, these southern, rural Protestants finally rose up in a doomed rebellion in 1702. After its suppression, so-called “Camisards” emigrated to London, where they made many English converts among the middling sort. Between 1706 and 1708, the French Prophets, as both the immigrants and their English followers were known, gained notoriety by asserting that the Holy Spirit was announcing the Apocalypse through their voices. Like the radical sectarians of the Civil War period, they called on the rich to divest themselves of wealth, allowed women to preach and excoriated the clergy of the established Church.59 They also staged shocking stunts, such as when a female Prophetess ran naked to the altar of the Sardinian chapel in Duke Street and declaimed for fifteen minutes. The movement began to falter after March 1708, when the planned resurrection from the dead of a follower failed to materialize.60
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