God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England

by Childs, Jessie

  Seventeen years later Mainy would inform an ecclesiastical court that ‘the tales which were told of that matter seemed strange unto me, as what extraordinary strength he had in his fits, how he roared like a bull, and many other things were then mentioned, which now I have forgotten’. At the time, though, he was more receptive to his hosts’ tale and, soon after the dinner, he too became ‘possessed’. He later claimed to have feigned his ‘pretended visions’ to please Father Weston and ‘to gain to myself a little foolish commendation or admiration because I saw how the Catholics that heard of them, and were present at many of my fond speeches, did seem to wonder at me’.4

  Also exorcised around this time were four servant girls, including Lady Vaux’s maid, Sara Williams. She was around sixteen years old and had previously attended the Peckhams of Denham in Bucking-hamshire, where she had reportedly been possessed and ‘dispossessed’ of ‘divers devils’. For a while the transfer to Hackney, a place considered ‘more convenient for the health not only of her body, but also of her soul’, seemed the perfect tonic. Sara acquired a ‘sweet & comfortable manner’ and displayed all the attributes that befitted the female servant of a devout household. Everything changed on New Year’s Day, 1586. As the Vauxes celebrated the Feast of the Circumcision of the Lord, one priest perceived by Sara’s ‘behaviour & gesture that all was not well’. Upon further examination, he concluded that she had been repossessed. He sent for some of his colleagues, who ‘prepared themselves, through the help of Almighty God & authority of his Church, to cast out & expel this troublesome devil from this young maid & virgin’.

  A manuscript account of Sara’s experience survives in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, within a vast two-volume Catholic encyclopaedia that once belonged to the Brudenells of Deene.fn2 The account was purportedly written by a ‘true witness’ and probably also appeared in the now-lost Miracle Book, a compendium of supernatural occurrences compiled to showcase the power of the Catholic Church.5 According to this witness, the devil, through Sara, repeatedly cursed and threatened the exorcists: ‘God’s wounds! God’s life! Six popish priests. Six popish priests. A pursuivant. A pursuivant. To prison with them & hang them. Hang them!’

  The following morning, the Vauxes ushered more priests into their home to do combat with Sara’s demon. He scoffed at their appearance and apparel, calling one ‘red face’ and ‘other priests that were in vestments going to Mass, white coat & red coat, whooping and shouting, and all to disturb the company that were at devout prayers’. During Mass, at the elevation of the host, he ‘would roar & screech in most terrible manner, saying: I will none of your God, turn away my face, turn away my face, turn me away!’

  Prayers and priestly commands having failed, the proceedings entered a terrifying phase:

  Well, quoth the Exorcist, I will punish and torment thee for thy obstinacy, & with that called for fire and brimstone. First he hallowed the fire, and after scraping the brimstone upon the coals, the devil roared & cried in most terrible manner, cursing & swearing, saying: A pox on you, God’s wounds, you will burn me.

  ‘It was a wonderful sight,’ our narrator assures us,

  to behold the pain & torment that the devil was put unto at the burning of the brimstone & holding the same before him at his nose, how he roared, tormented & screeched in most terrible manner, swelling in the face of the party, swearing & cursing so grievously that a man would have been afraid to have heard it.

  Another priest, ‘holding the party possessed by the head’, placed a relic under her nose: ‘The devil raged & tormented, sniffing and blowing & winding away the face of the party from it, spitting & crying most strangely.’ The Eucharist caused a similar reaction, as did a picture of the Virgin Mary, which led Sara’s devil to threaten to ‘hollowfn3 out so loud that I will be heard a great way’. The exorcist then gave her a ‘hallowed drink’, which made her ‘spew & spit … in most wonderful manner, sometimes crying out that the drink burned her’.

  Sara’s ordeal lasted from four o’clock in the morning till two or three in the afternoon. According to the Catholic narrative, her devil gradually began to succumb to priestly power. He gave his name as ‘St Maho’ and confessed to having lost Sara’s heart. He even said that Alexander Briant, who had been executed for treason alongside Edmund Campion and whose bone was utilised as a relic towards the end of the ritual, was a saint who had never suffered purgatory. ‘If this be not a sufficient testimony of the glorious martyrdom of our priests,’ the narrator writes, ‘I know not what we may believe.’

  Still the devil refused to depart. With ‘the whole company praying devoutly for the delivery of the maiden from the tyranny and power of Satan’, he made her ‘gape in most pitiful manner, and withal deformed so her face as any man’s heart would have bled to have seen the same’. He then retreated into Sara’s body. ‘Oh, he will break my belly,’ she cried, ‘he will break my belly; he lieth in the bottom of my belly.’ Indeed, so low did he descend, that:

  therewithal she called for the help of a woman. Then the priest, perceiving that the devil was gotten into the bottom of her belly, gave a relic unto one of the women, willing her to apply it unto the belly of the party, the which being done by the woman, it was wonderful to see how the devil was tormented.

  Finally, with Sara ‘calling upon the help of Almighty God and of our Blessed Lady’, the devil departed:

  And the maid, coming to herself, gave thanks to God for her safe delivery, for I thank God and our Blessed Lady, quoth she, I am now delivered; and being asked whether she saw him depart or no, she said, I did see him depart in the likeness of water. Whereat the exorcist and all the rest of the priests gave thanks to God.

  Thus ended the exorcism of Sara Williams.

  There are several ways of interpreting this episode. According to the ‘true witness’, it was a demonstration of ‘the wonderful work of Almighty God’, even ‘in these days so full of wickedness & impiety, so full of heresy & infidelity’. In granting his priests ‘such power and authority … to drive out & expel devils’, God had revealed the true Church. And ‘so would He have it done in the presence of many to give testimony of the same to the honour of His holy name & confirmation of the Catholic cause’. In an age when people noted supernatural phenomena as a matter of course, when they divined for treasure, executed witches and would have been hard-pressed to identify a precise boundary between religion and magic, the exorcism accounts in the Miracle Book were powerful propaganda. Here was the armoury of the resurgent Church of Rome in triumphant combat with the devil. ‘The intervention of heaven was undoubted,’ Weston later wrote in his Autobiography, ‘and incredulous onlookers were astounded.’6 Indeed, they became part of the ritual, the priest exhorting them to strengthen their devotion and redouble their prayers, so that when the devil was eventually repulsed, triumph was shared, faith was reinforced and the word was spread.

  Although the spectators at Hackney, ‘which were very many, respecting the dangers of the time and place’, were hardly unsympathetic to the Catholic cause, the subsequent publicising of the event aimed at wider conversion. Indeed, it has been persuasively argued that the exorcisms were ‘a crucial arm of the Tridentine missionary campaign to reconcile schismatics and evangelize Protestants’.7 Throughout the account of Sara’s exorcism, the devil is aligned with official religion. ‘All Protestants and heretics are at my right hand near unto me,’ he announces. ‘The schismatics’ – those Catholics who went to church – ‘are at my left hand somewhat farther off, yet notwithstanding they are all mine.’ He summons his pursuivant allies to capture the priests, but they are thwarted by the combined might of the Trinity and the Virgin Mary. When the devil is finally expelled, it is as much a triumph for Catholicism over the Elizabethan Settlement as it is for God over the devil. ‘Be then assured,’ the priests at Hackney proclaim, ‘that we will all spend our lives to expel & drive out of England all heretical spirits, & that we will yield our lives to save the Queen’s Majesty’s soul.’
/>   Here was a strain of post-Reformation English Catholicism that was muscular and ambitious. While many individuals preferred to lie low and wait, there were others – secular priests as well as Jesuits; laymen as well as clergymen – who were determined to effect change. The exorcisms of 1585–6 and their subsequent advertisement can be seen as part of the same evangelising impulse that stimulated William Allen to set up his seminary and Robert Persons his printing press; it drove Henry Vaux towards the Catholic underground and his father into communication with the Queen’s enemies on the Continent. A similar fervour sent men and women scrambling under the scaffold for ‘fresh green new relics’ in order to make saints of their martyrs, even though Rome would not recognise them as such until the twentieth century. Here were English Catholics, in defiance of Elizabethan law and free from the strict regulations of Tridentine Europe, attempting to seize the initiative and reclaim their faith.

  Not all of their co-religionists were delighted with their behaviour. According to Friswood Williams, who was ‘dispossessed’ soon after her younger sister Sara, the exorcisms divided the community ‘in so much as divers ancient Catholics themselves did utterly dislike them, and the priests themselves grew to be afraid’. Sara herself later claimed that one priest, Father Yaxley, shook his head when she told him what had happened to her, and said ‘he was very sorry for it, and that he hoped they had repented themselves for dealing so with her’. When pressed for his opinion as to whether or not Sara had actually been demonically possessed, he closed ranks and ‘would give her no other answer, but shaking his head, will[ed] her to be contented, seeing all was now past’.8

  Nor, it seems, were the exorcisms particularly effective in winning souls. Had the priest who boasted of five hundred conversions been remotely accurate, one would have expected a robust response from the authorities, but there was little evidence of immediate concern. According to Weston, Lord Burghley ‘merely laughed’ when informed of the practice and ‘brushed it all aside as probable fraud and as a series of impostures devised by priests in order to deceive people’.9 At the turn of the century, however, the events of 1585–6 became interesting to the establishment and an investigation was launched. It may be that with time the popular appeal of spirit dispossession had grown, but there were also intersectarian rivalries at play. The enquiry was spearheaded by the Bishop of London, Richard Bancroft, and his chaplain, Samuel Harsnett, the future Archbishop of York. In 1603 Harsnett published his findings in a book entitled:

  A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures, to with-draw the harts of her Majesties Subiects from their allegeance, and from the truth of Christian Religion professed in England, under the pretence of casting out devils.

  Practised by Edmunds, alias Weston a Jesuit, and divers Romish Priests his wicked associates.

  Where-unto are annexed the Copies of the Confessions, and Examinations of the parties themselves, which were pretended to be possessed, and dispossessed, taken upon oath before her Majesties Commissioners, for Causes Ecclesiasticall.10

  The full title betrays the churchmen’s agenda. William Weston was only one of around twelve Catholic priests involved in the exorcisms of the mid-1580s, and he was the only Jesuit, but Harsnett gave him prominence in order to discredit the Society and capitalise on the divisions within the Catholic community at the time of publication. Harsnett and Bancroft insisted that the age of miracles had long since ceased. They had recently secured the conviction for fraud of John Darrell, a radical Puritan exorcist, and they extracted ‘confessions’ from some of the 1585–6 demoniacs in their ongoing campaign to expose all such practices as ‘diabolical legerdemain’.11

  Harsnett’s retrospective commentary on the events at Hackney, Denham and elsewhere is no more reliable, therefore, than the heavily didactic accounts written by the Catholic eyewitnesses. Both are exploitative works of religious propaganda. Harsnett’s latest editor has shown that he asked leading questions, suppressed information that did not suit his agenda and may even have tampered with witness statements.12 Needless to say, his ‘immodest style and lascivious pen’ (as one Puritan divine described it13) attracted the playwrights of the day. The Declaration was a source for Ben Jonson’s Volpone and supplied Shakespeare with the names of the fake demons by which Edgar protected himself from unfair persecution.

  In Harsnett’s hands, the exorcism of Sara Williams is a sordid tale of mental, physical and sexual abuse. It may very well be the case that some readers have concluded as much from the Catholic account extracted above from the Brudenell manuscript. After all, a group of men in authority had fumigated a teenaged girl with noxious substances and forced her to imbibe a ‘hallowed drink’ that made her vomit. At one stage of the proceedings, Sara had suffered a ‘beating … about the head with a maniple’; at another, she had been forced to wear an alb.fn4 Her torture and humiliation before a conventicle of her superiors must have been terrifying. After complaining that the devil ‘lieth in the bottom of my belly’, she had also had to endure a relic being applied there by ‘one of the women’ in the Vaux household. After much torment, the devil had reportedly left her body ‘in the likeness of water’.

  According to Sara’s deposition, taken sixteen years later on 24 April 1602 and published the following year in Harsnett’s Declaration, the priests, ‘when they were weary with dealing with her’, would announce that:

  the wicked spirits were gone down into her leg, and sometimes into her foot, and that they should rest there for that time. And again, when they took her in hand the next time, they would begin to hunt the devil from the foot to bring him upwards, of purpose as they said to cause him, when they had him in her head, to go out of her mouth, ears, eyes, or nose. And the manner of their hunting of him was to follow him with their hands (as they did pretend) along all the parts of her body.

  At one time, when it began to be with this examinate according to the manner of women (as since she hath perceived), whereby she was much troubled, the priests did pretend that the devil did rest in the most secret part of her body. Whereupon they devised to apply the relics unto it, and gave her such sliber-sauces as made her (as she was persuaded) much worse than otherwise she thinketh she should have been. At some times they would cause a maid that served the Lord Vaux to apply the relics unto the place: the which their dealing with her (she saith) she doth now loathe the memory of it.14

  ‘Good God!’ Harsnett exclaimed, ‘what do we hear? Or is it but a dream? Or have we ears to hear such impious unnatural villainy?’ He lambasted the ‘fiery holy hands’ of the priests, ‘having a rank itch in their fingers to be fiddling at that sport’. He questioned why the devil would go anywhere near ‘that nameless part’ in Sara, since the priests had made it their ‘quest and haunt which they had hunted sore, had crossed, recrossed and surcrossed with their holy hands’.15

  It seems a tragedy that something as natural as the onset of menstruation could be interpreted as a sign of possession, but contemporaries were convinced of the ubiquity of the devil, who was known to delight in blood, and the ‘monthly flux of excrementitous and unprofitable blood’ was regarded with suspicion and hostility.16 Menstruating women were polluted and polluting and if, like Sara and her fellow demoniac Anne Smith, they suffered from ‘fits of the mother’ – a condition that seems to have combined period pains and hysteria – then there might have been further cause to single them out for the exorcist’s chair.fn5 The intense drama of the exorcisms may also have encouraged over-credulity and the suspension of common sense. If Sara’s stomach rumbled, the priests would make it a ‘wonderful matter’. Likewise, another demoniac, William Trayford, was suspected of having a devil in his toe because he sometimes ‘felt a spice of the gout’. Harsnett reacted at his sneering best:

  Now, what a woeful taking are all those poor creatures that have about them by birth, casualty or mishap any close imper, ache or other more secret infirmity? When a pain in a maid’s belly, a stitch in her side, an ache in her head, a cramp in her leg, a t
inkling in her toe (if the good exorcist please), must needs hatch a devil and bring forth such chair-work, fire-work, and devil-work as you shall hear hereafter?17

  Although Sara later condemned the Miracle Book writers ‘for their false and dissembling dealing with her’, she was wary of accusing her own exorcists of fraud. At the time and during her subsequent examination when she was encouraged to cast aspersions, she seems to have believed that they had acted in good faith. Indeed, she admitted that she would ‘feed them with visions, saying she had seen this and that when she had seen no such matter, but only spake to content them’.18 The priests saw and heard what they fervently wanted to see and hear: a terrified girl, susceptible to maladies and mood swings, inhabited by the devil and in desperate need of the miraculous cure that only the Catholic Church could provide. Harsnett, Bancroft and their faction were equally bent on concluding that Sara was a victim of ‘egregious Popish imposture’. If both camps were guilty of sensational writing, it might charitably be attributed to artistic licence: reality might have been heightened, but it was still reality, still the truth in the eyes of its beholders.19

  It is not the historian’s job to make lofty judgements. The rights and wrongs of the case depended, and perhaps still depend, very much on one’s viewpoint. There were the inevitable few who acted in bad faith,fn6 but most, surely, did not. William Weston was so certain of the miraculous and proselytising power of the exorcisms that he ‘wished that the Queen had been present, or one of her Council, to witness the sights, or that they could have taken place in public’.20 The Vauxes, for their part, not only hosted some of the sessions, but also regaled guests with the details afterwards. The keynote was triumphalism. There is no reason to doubt that most spectators were indeed ‘astonished’ by the charisma of the priests and the miracle they believed they had seen. Their pity for Sara – ‘there was not one person which beheld her distress whose eyes flowed not with tears for compassion of her pains’21 – was transformed into thanksgiving at her deliverance. Harsnett may have mocked their credulity, but he did not question the sincerity of their emotions.