In this febrile atmosphere, fears and emotions could easily get out of control. And in the town of Salem, they did.
Two hundred people were accused of witchcraft, over a hundred people were imprisoned and nineteen innocent people were executed. The youngest detainee was the four-year-old girl Dorcas Good, remanded to custody for witchcraft alongside her mother. Numbers grew rapidly as the apparently possessed young girls of Salem accused more and more decent people of being witches. Phips commissioned a new temporary oyer and terminer court to take over from the Salem County Court.
Salem had many refugees from the recent massacres in Maine carried out by Indians paid by the French, which were the opening shots of a series of wars between the French and English. In the strange unsettled mood, New England was regarded as being under attack – from supernatural enemies who were getting the upper hand, and from Indians who were perceived as agents of Satan. Cotton Mather, the clergyman son of Increase Mather, and an equally influential personality of the day, gave chapter and verse to the fears that evil spirits were present in large numbers. Memorable Providences Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions dealt with his attempt to exorcise a young girl he believed to be possessed.
In the agitated climate the absurd accusations of overwrought teenage girls blew up into a major crisis. The new court to investigate what was going on did nothing to calm the panicky atmosphere. In June twelve ministers – including Increase Mather – protested at the court’s decision to allow what was called ‘spectral evidence’. It eroded the rule of law New England prided itself on. Spectral evidence – a witness said he had seen the accused witch sitting on his stomach at midnight – got Bridget Bishop hanged. Nathaniel Saltonstall resigned, disgusted by the madness which had afflicted judges as much as plaintiffs. But Elizabeth’s stepson Jonathan Curwen, one of the Salem County magistrates in charge of committing the accused witches to prison before trial, had no such qualms. He took Saltonstall’s place.
Spectral evidence continued to be allowed because the judges genuinely believed there was a diabolic conspiracy against New England. Behind the hysteria was social envy and long-standing feuds between the poorer farming community and wealthy mercantile families.
Plymouth was unique amongst its fellow Puritan colonies in having very little truck with witchcraft. Only one person was ever tried in Plymouth. In 1677 Mary Ingham was accused of bewitching Mehitabel Woodworth so that she fell into fits and was almost deprived of her senses. Ingham was swiftly acquitted, perhaps because there were so many reasons for people to be deprived of their senses after the war.
It was hard not to be affected by the anxiety. If you believed in God, the Devil was the other side of the coin. At a time when witchcraft was dying out as a crime in Europe, there were ninety-three witch trials in New England. At the end of the century when Isaac built his grand modern house, with its wide windows and portico, he had anti-witches marks carved into the beam over the fireplace in what is known as the winter kitchen.
* * *
Elizabeth Curwen’s house overlooked the courtroom. Ashen-faced men and women were taken there by George Curwen’s great-nephew, Sheriff George Curwen. They endured the ordeal of teenage girls falling down in self-induced fits because one of the accused had given them ‘a look’. Most of them were highly respectable people of good character. Sheriff Curwen also confiscated the accused’s goods on behalf of the government (in reality for himself).
On 30 April 1692 Elizabeth’s pious neighbour Mary English was arrested in the middle of the night and dragged to Salem jail to join the rest of its terrified inhabitants. Married to Philip English, a merchant whose wealth rivalled George Curwen’s, and a member herself of the distinguished local Hollingsworth family, Mary was sufficiently devout to have been admitted a full member of her church. A pillar of Salem society, as her granddaughter angrily recalled, she simply could not believe what was happening to her.
Mary’s husband had been born Philip l’Anglais in Jersey. He was a French-speaker, an outsider, and a wealthy member of the mercantile elite. Powerful friends got Mary sent to the less dangerous jail in Boston. Philip English was persuaded he must join his wife there. In August Governor Phips seems to have helped spirit the Englishes away to New York to avoid the trial process, which he himself was beginning to deplore.
Meanwhile Sheriff Curwen took the opportunity to seize all Philip English’s property. Twenty ships and 200 sheep were impounded. In appalling scenes the house so close to Elizabeth’s was plundered. It shocked the town at a time when most people had become unshockable. Huge mirrors with elaborate frames, beautiful tables, ancient Dutch and French pictures, and lots of wine were ferried out of the front door.
The Mathers had a unique position in New England. One of the most influential and socially prominent families in the history of seventeenth-century Massachusetts, Increase Mather and his son Cotton were both ministers at the North Church, and both used their pulpits to extraordinary effect. Increase, who was president of Harvard, was in a difficult position because it would have been very peculiar if he had undermined Phips by criticising the trials. In the end, however, his uneasy conscience forced him to speak out. His pamphlet Cases of Conscience of 3 October 1692 helped bring the trials to an end.
A few brave souls stood up to the process, including John Proctor, the rational wealthy farmer accused of being a witch, whom Arthur Miller made the central character of The Crucible. Proctor wrote a letter to five influential ministers of Boston’s main churches pointing out that evidence was gathered through torture. In his view the ‘magistrates, ministers, juries and all the people in general’ were ‘enraged and incensed against us by the delusion of the Devil’. He was nevertheless executed as a witch on Gallows Hill that August. His pregnant wife was reprieved, until she delivered her baby.
To prevent his property being confiscated the well-to-do farmer Giles Corey tried refusing to acknowledge the authority of the court by not entering a plea. For this he was pressed to death under stones, a punishment called peine forte et dure. Witnesses relate that because Sheriff Curwen was angry at being deprived of Corey’s goods, he stuffed Corey’s tongue back into his mouth with a stick as he died.
The witch-hunt menace spread to Plymouth with accusations against the son of John Alden. His trade with Indians was said to mean he was in league with the Devil. His father had been one of the most venerable of the Mayflower colonists. John Alden junior was a leading citizen and he treated the proceedings with robust disdain. Arriving in Salem to a court hearing, Alden was surrounded by what he contemptuously described as wenches with their ‘juggling tricks’. They cried out that Alden was pinching them, though Alden was sitting far away from them on a chair in the courthouse. Alden described sorrowfully how even his old friend Judge Bartholomew Gedney, a Salem judge, believed their nonsense. ‘I wonder at God in suffering these creatures to accuse innocent people.’ To his complete astonishment he was detained for fifteen weeks to await trial.
Then ‘observing the manner of Trials, and Evidence then taken’, so little did Alden and his relations trust Salem’s justice that he was sprung from jail. He was then hidden from vengeful witch-hunters in Duxbury, until, as he said, people regained their reason.
The frenzy at Salem became so uncontrolled even Jonathan Curwen’s mother-in-law, Margaret Thacher of Boston, was named, though never arrested.
By the autumn Governor Phips was very uneasy. Respectable citizens had gone to their deaths screaming their innocence. Their corpses were still swinging on Gallows Hill. In November he heard there was a warrant out for his own wife’s arrest. Saying Salem was a ‘black cloud threatening this province with destruction’, Phips took executive action to address a situation that was out of control. He dissolved the court and shut down the trials.
In the unfair way of events, affairs did not return to the status quo ante. Philip English’s possessions could not be wrested from Sheriff Curwen. Estimating he had lost the enormous sum of close
to £2,000, English was very angry indeed. Probably because of her ordeal his wife died young at the age of forty-four. Sheriff Curwen himself was carried off at the age of only thirty by what seems to have been a stroke – some said it was a curse by one of his victims. English is said to have seized Curwen’s body during its funeral procession. He kept it in his cellar and refused to give it back until some of his property was returned.
Penelope Winslow had her own anxieties about her daughter in Rhode Island because of her son-in-law’s condition. Stephen Burton was a cultivated and refined individual, supposed to possess a degree from Oxford. He became the first recording officer of his county, clerk of the peace, and was a conscientious deputy who five times represented Bristol to the General Court. He also suffered from depression. There were rumours he was neglecting his clerical duties ‘in consequence of a disorder in the head’.
On 22 July 1693, he died. Whether the strain of business killed him is not clear. Perhaps it was a brain tumour. He may have wanted a mother for his children by his first marriage more than he wanted a second wife, though Elizabeth seems to have had at least two children of her own: Penelope and Thomas. (Thomas – a great-grandson of Edward Winslow – lived to see the American Revolutionary Wars begin, dying in 1779.)
Elizabeth had a house so immense that a cow was said to have got into one of the fourteen-foot fireplaces. But at some point she moved back to Marshfield, probably into her mother’s home. She does not seem to have married again.
In 1700 Penelope’s son Isaac married Sarah Wensley, a member of one of the most cultivated and well-to-do families in Boston. Six children were rapidly produced, all of whom were brought up at Careswell. The daughter of a Boston merchant, John Wensley, who had a large well-appointed house in the North End, Sarah may have found Marshfield isolated since Isaac’s legal work took him to Plymouth and he also served on the Council for the Province of Massachusetts Bay in Boston.
Sarah brought substantial wealth into the family, but she may also have been a high spender. Her will shows she had a velvet cloak, along with a velvet handkerchief, a gold necklace, locket and earrings. She must have been a confident young woman who liked to make a striking impression. Isaac Winslow’s will itemises several looking glasses. Sarah may have enjoyed catching a glimpse of herself as she bustled round their house, which was covered with printed wallpaper – a novelty for New England.
The witchcraft trials must have seemed a world away. Religion was losing its sway even in New England in the face of successful commercial society. The value placed on reason made way for the Enlightenment, driving out the hold superstition had had over the minds even of the educated.
By the late 1690s spectral evidence had been utterly discredited. There were church services in which the witchcraft accusers asked forgiveness. In the most thorough investigation of the Salem drama, historians Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum concluded the accusations were part of ‘the Puritan temper during that final, often intense, and occasionally lurid efflorescence which signalled the end of its century-long history’.
* * *
Penelope’s links with England had become attenuated. Josiah’s Wake cousins were still alive but the relationship seems to have petered out; certainly there is no correspondence. Although Amie Wake had died young, William Wake lived to see their son, another William, rise high. Admired for his eloquence and emphasis on pastoral care, he became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1716, probably thanks to his close friendship with the intellectual, serious-minded Princess of Wales, the future Queen Caroline.
The passage of time had not been good to the Pelhams. In 1692 Penelope’s nephew – son of her brother Waldegrave and named after him – was found guilty of homicide. He had hit a local man, Hugh Polley, with a wooden stick and Polley had died. Young Waldegrave opted to plead benefit of clergy and slunk home to his house at Chappell near Bures St Mary. He said he had been misled by a diabolic force: ‘Not having God before his eyes’ he had been ‘moved and misled by the instigation of the devil’. It was another way of expressing the pressure he was living under. The finances of his father Waldegrave were in such poor shape that he needed dramatically to increase his existing mortgages. Then he ran out of land to raise money on. The last mortgage – which made his debts £4,800 in total – was secured on his younger brother Edward’s property in Lincolnshire. By the end of his life Waldegrave’s debts were treble those of his father Herbert.
In 1685 Dame Anne Robinson, who may have been a neighbour, swooped on the floundering Waldegrave. She took out a mortgage for £1,000 on the manor of Ferriers itself and bought his other large mortgage, for £2,000. Then in 1688 she sold on the Pelham mortgages to Richard Dickson, a wealthy haberdasher. In 1691 Waldegrave found himself short again. His new friend Dickson was happy to lend him an additional £1,000. Documents in the National Archives show that, like a Monopoly game, Dickson’s collection of Pelham mortgages was now complete. Edward returned to England from Rhode Island, tried to enter his Lincolnshire property and was rebuffed. Everything was now controlled by Richard Dickson.
But because one of the terms of Herbert’s will was that no monies had to be paid out until his debts were paid off, Waldegrave still held the trump card. He always denied Herbert’s debts were entirely paid. In 1694 Edward set off for London. Perhaps he intended to sell his property as his life was so clearly fixed in New England. Since 1682 he had been married to Freelove Arnold, the daughter of the former governor of Rhode Island, and he was living in some splendour in her house in Newport. He may also have feared some of the possessions he was owed in Herbert’s will might have been sold off – including ‘one great silver tankard which was given him by his grandfather Godfrey Bossevile esquire with the inlaid cabinet and all in it that stands in the kitchen chamber at Ferriers’. Penelope and his aunts may have urged him to do something. Penelope was still hopeful of getting that legacy.
Despite Edward’s wild ways he was a better businessman than his father and half-brother. Having also had the good fortune to marry a very rich wife, he hung on to his property in New England and probably increased it. He was enraged by Waldegrave. In his court deposition, Edward suggested that jewels and plate as well as papers detailing trusts and bonds had been secretly stolen from his father’s study by Waldegrave, and the bonds not presented at the right time for payment because of incompetence. Whatever the truth, it was no good. The Pelham fortune was gone.
* * *
In 1697, either pushed by her nephew Edward or emboldened by his activities, Mistress Penelope Bellingham now entered the fray, and claimed arrears from her own annuity. She revealed that in the past Waldegrave had said that there was a secret deed in existence that meant that nothing was owed. For many years she had felt too helpless to do anything, but now she asked for a subpoena to see the deed in court.
Because the judgements of the Pelham cases cannot be found it is not clear what happened next, but it seems likely Penelope Bellingham got her arrears. A year after his last appearance in court, in 1699 Waldegrave died, worn out from the strain. Edward was appointed estate administrator, by a grant from the Prerogative Court in February 1700. Waldegrave junior – the heir – was left out. This suggests Edward won.
Perhaps because he had got his own way in Old England, Edward decided the moment had come to claim Herbert’s land in New England. In 1702 he asked the Massachusetts government not only for Herbert’s 400 acres, but also Thomas Waldegrave’s.
Penelope Winslow was fond enough of her larger-than-life half-brother. She probably attended his wedding to his heiress wife and was lavishly entertained in Newport. But when Edward asked the court for land owed to Thomas Waldegrave, he crossed a line. Penelope fired off a furious counter-petition to the General Court claiming all Thomas Waldegrave’s stake, on the grounds that Edward was not even related to Thomas. Edward’s grandfather, Penelope dictated, probably to her lawyer son Isaac, was not Thomas but Godfrey Bossevile. It was outrageous that he was laying claim to her l
and or her children’s land when not a drop of Waldegrave blood flowed in his veins.
On 30 June 1703, less than six months before she died, in a vehement, bold and highly personal piece of writing, the seventy-year-old Penelope refused to accept her father’s will, petitioning the General Court to stop Edward. He had ‘no right at all to the said lands of the said Mr Waldgrave being no way related or of kin to him’, she wrote furiously.
Perhaps Penelope was made more furious by the slow disappearance of all her old friends and a wish to put down a marker about the world she had known that was passing. Elizabeth Curwen had been laid to rest with a magnificent funeral, so that in death she retrieved some of her former state. Elizabeth had been more like a sister. Yet now she lay in the ground of the Broad Street Cemetery in Salem beside her husband.
Penelope went further than just claiming the 400 acres of her grandfather Waldegrave’s land. She also wanted half of her father Herbert’s own grant. It was she who should take the lion’s share, ‘to whom of right the greatest grant of said lands doth appertain. And not to the said Edward Pelham who though he be a son of the said Herbert Pelham yet not his sole heir, and not being the eldest son hath no more right to said land than your petitioner.’
On 21 July the House of Representatives accepted Penelope had some kind of interest – though not to her father’s land. Edward’s laying out of the disputed acreage was suspended. Ten years later the General Court finally found in favour of Penelope’s claim that she was the only heir in New England to her grandfather’s 400 acres, which were granted to her children. Her suit had been successfully pursued by her daughter Elizabeth Burton and her son Isaac. He may have lent his legal expertise to helping draft his mother’s petition to the General Court, but the tone of angry outrage was all hers. It was the final act in her attempt to retrieve some portion of her Waldegrave legacy. This time she would not be deprived.
The Mayflower Page 39
