The Witches: Salem, 1692

by Stacy Schiff

  * The great Enlightenment thinkers were not altogether different. Robert Boyle proposed interviews with miners who in their excavations had met with “subterraneous demons.” Newton divided his time between the occult and physics, practicing alchemy and devoting 300,000 words to the book of Revelation; Keynes termed him “the last of the magicians.” Isaac Newton identified the Antichrist. John Locke applied astrology to the harvest of medicinal herbs.

  * The 1692 almanac warned that the March alignment of the stars portended feuds and skirmishes: “In short mankind in general are about this time inclined to violence.”

  * Rare was the New Englander who agreed with Samuel Sewall’s suit-adverse father-in-law who remarked, “I observe the law to be very much like a lottery—great charge, little benefit.”

  * The saints who appeared to Joan of Arc also thoughtfully identified themselves.

  * Consciously or not, Putnam deferred to two prophets who experienced trances and visions.

  * Or as Dumbledore assures Harry Potter: “Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”

  † His verses, it was said, “certainly ought to establish the fame of Nicholas Noyes as the most gifted and brilliant master ever produced in America, of the most execrable form of poetry to which the English language was ever degraded.” No surviving evidence contradicts that claim.

  * The reluctance was particularly odd as Lewis did know Hobbs. Evidently she had more to lose by admitting as much than she did by feigning ignorance. We too are left squinting in the pewter light; there were many more agendas in Hathorne’s courtroom than are visible to the twenty-first-century eye.

  * One long-haired, severely pockmarked Topsfield man was released when the girls could not agree he was the witch in question. The authorities led him outside the meetinghouse, where the light was better. Still the girls hesitated. “How did you know his name?” Hathorne challenged, puzzled by their indecision. “He did not tell me himself, but other witches told me,” one of them explained. Sixty-year-old Nehemiah Abbott would be the only accused witch to walk free from a Hathorne hearing.

  * Excepting the work of Parris, Cheever, and a few others, the written record is a sampler of phonetic idiosyncrasies. Proper names appear in every conceivable variation, as if conjugated. Indeed “Tituba” could be spelled eight different ways (three of them on the same day), but “Hollingworth” appeared in nearly as many mutations as well. The governor, his wife, and his son each spelled “Winthrop” differently. Individuals submitted affidavits that suggested their authors were, as was said of one Burroughs (or, as he sometimes wrote, “Burrough”) accuser, “sublimely unaware of punctuation and a pioneer in spelling reform.” Orthography proved as fluid as the Salem-Topsfield border.

  * “When the devil finds an idle person,” Cotton Mather warned in 1689, “he as it were, calls to more of his crew, ‘Come here! Come here! A brave prize for us all!’”

  * Betty’s would not be the last meltdown in the pious Sewall household. In 1713 a servant knocked on her master’s bedroom door after midnight; the day’s sermon had left her too petrified to sleep. The Sewalls comforted her before the fire. She illustrated a familiar Salem phenomenon: visions—whether in the form of suffocating women, apple-scattering goblins, or avenging ghosts—tended to appear on the Sabbath, when people had been (or should have been) in church.

  * The Indians did childhood differently. Indian mothers bore fewer children, doled out liberties rather than punishments, and wept freely over the children they lost. The kids had leisure time! That pampering was not lost on the Puritans. “Let not English parents be as indulgent and negligent as they report the Indians are,” warned Mather, defensive on the subject. A fair number of Indian captives elected to remain. One boy returned only when bound, arms and legs; he escaped soon afterward to rejoin his Indian family.

  † Mather however hesitated to share tales of evil angels with his children, a son remembered, lest they “entertain any frightful fancies about the apparitions of devils.”

  * By 1692 Justice Jonathan Corwin had lost seven children, among them three boys named John.

  * The hired help was in no danger of disappearing. The moment anyone went missing, a Huguenot settler observed, you had only to notify the Indians, who for a modest fee would locate him for you. Flight was in any event rare, “for they would know not where to go, there being few trodden roads.”

  * Mather acknowledged their formidable force when, late in life, he griped that women had heaped more opprobrium on him than on any man alive. Were there more than twenty women in Boston who had not “at some time or other, spoken basely of me?” he asked.

  * As Hilary Mantel writes retrospectively of her six-year-old self: “What I am experiencing is the beginning of compunction, but is it the awakening of a sense of sin, or is it the beginning of femininity?”

  * It was a lousy bargain. Eager to discuss the area’s defense, the newly installed New Hampshire lieutenant governor complained to Crown authorities in the fall of 1692 that he “could after tedious waiting get no other answer but neglect, slights, and reproaches” out of Massachusetts governor William Phips, despite the enemy skulking in the woods. In April 1693, he warned that “by the next ships you will hear the province of Massachusetts and the province of Hampshire are in civil war.”

  * To encourage others to settle among the ruins, town officials asked Burroughs if he might relinquish three-quarters of his waterfront tract. They could offer a hundred acres farther inland in exchange. Graciously Burroughs ceded an even greater part of the original property. And in an unprecedented move for a New England minister, especially one with a large family, he declined the offer of additional land, settling for thirty coastal acres of salt marsh.

  * If indeed Burroughs said as much, he misspoke. He had baptized a second child in 1691.

  * The 1656 offense of Ann Hibbins—said after her witchcraft execution to “have had more wit than her neighbors”—had been that she knew when others were speaking about her. Burroughs boasted of and demonstrated a cleverness that seemed clairvoyant.

  * Sarah Ruck was unlucky in love. Her first husband entered simultaneously into two marriages. Having legally untangled herself from him in 1664, she married William Hathorne, Justice Hathorne’s older brother. Burroughs was her third husband.

  * “Deliver us from all evil” raised suspicions. “Hollowed be thy name” sounded like a sly curse, as Elizabeth Procter discovered.

  * Whether or not Phips actually tended a flock is open to debate. Mather asserted he did in a work conflating New England’s history with that of the Promised Land; he had every reason to make the colony’s savior a shepherd if he had not been one already.

  * The sunken treasure was Spanish, from a forty-five-year-old wreck. Indian divers salvaged it, allegedly managing forty-five minutes underwater at a time, using tubs lowered over their heads.

  * In fairness, these were years when you could die of smallpox in four days but word that you had done so could take fifteen months to cross an ocean, as would be the case with Queen Mary. When she had ordered Massachusetts to establish a proper postal system, the letter took ten months to reach Phips. He ignored it.

  † He was fortunate in that a gentleman was not expected to write well. Penmanship remained a clerk’s art.

  * He had himself been against the new charter before he was for it. After having huffed that he would rather die than consent to a document that so cramped Massachusetts liberties—the colony preferred to elect its own officers, as it had done earlier—he was reminded that he did not hail from a sovereign state.

  * Some refused to associate with those who did. One prominent New Englander in London in 1692 so violently disapproved of the new charter—the instructions had been to safeguard the old—that he refused to sail to North America on any vessel that carried Increase Mather.

  * The brimstone appears to have been added between Salem and Boston. There i
s no trace of it in the court papers.

  † Phips would later hold that he had established a court to discern whether witchcraft or possession was at work. The word “possession” falls in and out of favor; whole months went by without its mention, although on the day of his Boston return Increase Mather used it too. He found the country in a dire state “by reason of witchcrafts and possessed persons.”

  * As a sixteenth-century French physician had assured Henry IV, those who said that it was difficult to distinguish a devil’s mark from a natural blemish were not good doctors.

  † Massachusetts never attempted that experiment, although the day after Mather wrote Richards, an accused Connecticut witch requested it. The method had a quirk: the innocent could exonerate herself only by near-drowning.

  * There was some confusion as to what purpose the marks served. As the great seventeenth-century English witch-finder general explained, the devil was a spirit. He had no need for human blood. The teats served not for nourishment but to aggravate the witch, remind her of her covenant, and allow the devil to enter her body, the better to control it. The teat could look like any number of things, from the footprint of a hare to that of a mouse. Whole pamphlets were devoted to the subject, although it is unlikely that anyone in Salem had read them. Those who examined Tituba found scratches, understood to have been left by the devil in the course of their bodily tussle.

  † The only member of the Massachusetts bench with a legal education—instrumental in formulating Massachusetts’s first body of law—had left a will so convoluted that, after several years’ dispute, the court chose to ignore it. Massachusetts would not allow lawyers to practice for fees until 1704.

  * The Bishop testimony reinforces Somerset Maugham’s quip: “A woman may be as wicked as she likes, but if she isn’t pretty it won’t do her much good.” Mather stamps out any smoldering innuendo in his account, where the kisses are nowhere to be found.

  * We have the account solely from Mather, who has Bishop accomplish the deed with the help of an invisible demon.

  * As if her fate were not grim enough, Bishop appears to have been confused with another uncooperative suspect. John Hale swore out testimony against that Bishop; it was mistakenly attached to Bridget.

  * On the ladder, her skirts tied and face covered, the woman was reprieved. Sixty spectators suffered injuries on the bridge.

  * As one scholar put it, the accepted wisdom appeared to be that if you sued, you were better off socioeconomically. “If you sued a lot, you were better off still.”

  * An Oxford MA in divinity presided over the 1692 trials while a minister with no degree preached in Salem village. Both were anomalies for the time.

  * Mather could have an anxiety dream about an unprepared sermon and go on to compose it in his sleep. Between 1689 and 1691, he published twenty-two volumes. He knew people disliked him for publishing so much. He was unrepentant. On a 1699 list of “favors of heaven” came, in third place, “that I should be a more silly and shallow person than most in this country; and yet write and print more books, and have greater opportunities to do good by my published composures, than any man that ever was in this country, or indeed in all America.”

  * Milborne’s younger brother had been beheaded for treason in New York a year earlier; he was the criminal not yet dead when cut down from the gallows. Thomas Newton had prosecuted the case.

  * The doctor concluded that “some evil person” had bewitched her. In his account, Mather preferred “some devil had certainly bewitched her.”

  * It divided individuals too. Imperative as it was to take sides in 1692, some villagers took several. John Putnam Sr. seems to have been both for and against Nurse.

  * By the laws of England, Stoughton assured Plymouth’s governor in 1681, a jury’s verdict of not guilty could mean nothing other than not guilty. In colonial practice, the prisoner could be dealt a grievous punishment regardless, commensurate with the magnitude of his crime.

  * Stoughton had humbly protested the installation of that royal official in 1678. Given his lack of fortune, he was unlikely to be honest. It was a particularly rich remark under the circumstances. As the too-poor-to-be-principled official observed nine years later, Stoughton and his associates had “amassed great quantities of this country.”

  † As a British official informed Boston’s wealthiest merchant in 1684, “I find all are mad in your country.”

  * The suspicion reached back a generation. In the 1660s, Sewall’s father-in-law had fumed that the English had no right to come to North America to “seek the subversion of our civil and ecclesiastical politics.”

  † There was no question that all was in disarray under Andros, especially for speculators. Land sales were impossible at the time, as no one knew if payment should be made to the proprietors or to the king.

  * Three summers earlier he had noted the crimp of public service on his wallet. Tempted though he was to “eat up the poor as bread and squeeze them to death by virtue of an office,” he looked about for other means of supporting himself.

  * The effervescent Noyes, a rarity among clergymen for never having married, necessarily spent time among his female parishioners.

  * And it was a line so good that Nathaniel Hawthorne lent it to a man. He gives it to Matthew Maule in The House of the Seven Gables. Good may have borrowed it from two Quakers who had perished on a Boston scaffold thirty years earlier.

  † Legend has it that the families quietly recovered the bodies; Nurse’s sons were said to have done so after nightfall that evening. No trace of the five women has been found.

  * On her way to the gallows, the Goodwins’ tormentor had implicated her daughter.

  * Massachusetts law prohibited torture with one exception: In a capital case, it could be employed to extract the names of confederates, with the provision that measures not prove “barbarous and inhumane.” Though frowned upon, the procedure was not unfamiliar. A decade earlier, a man had strung up his servant “as butchers do beasts for the slaughter.”

  * Procter was not the first defendant to invoke the Inquisition. In 1668 a fiery Salem ship carpenter landed in court after railing that Massachusetts magistrates acted like Spanish inquisitors. Once arrested, he held, a man “had as good be hanged.” Three witnesses testified to the truth of his diatribe while stipulating that they had no idea what the Inquisition was.

  * Reverend John Bailey had taken in an afflicted Goodwin boy. Witchcraft touched the other two First Church ministers personally as well; in June, Reverend Moody’s wife was accused, a charge that fell on deaf ears. Reverend James Allen still held the title to the three-hundred-acre Nurse estate. He received annual payments from the widower of an executed witch.

  * Life as a fugitive was not cheap. English estimated that his weeks in hiding cost him about fifty pounds, a sum greater than the entire Bishop estate.

  * It did not help that many of the New York authorities were Dominion officials who had done jail time in the wake of the Massachusetts coup. New York’s attorney general had shared a cramped, swampy cell with Andros.

  * One group that did benefit from New World social fluidity was the clergy. They enjoyed little social status in England but leapfrogged to the head of the line in North America, where—in the absence of gentry—they occupied a rank just below the magistrates. If anyone in town had a fine cushion or a looking glass, it was usually a minister. Their position proved enviable enough that in 1699, several impostor ministers arrived in Boston.

  † A number of creative equivalents were coined in the name of social harmony. The Deerfield authorities, for example, deemed that “the second seat in the front gallery and the hind seat in the front gallery shall be equal in dignity with the fifth seat in the body of the meetinghouse.”

  * Dress was aspirational, even dangerously so, for both sexes. A piece of silk stolen by the Hales’ maid wound its way around a hat worn by Dorcas Hoar’s son.