The second day, Wednesday, January 4, inaugurated the next round of witch trials.
Again, as in the summer past, a batch of prisoners was taken from the jail and, stepping over snow and slush and huddling together against the wind, led around the streets to the town house. Those left behind could only hope that matters would be different during this session—a modest hope, frail as it was. News that spectral evidence was no longer acceptable had to have reached the prisoners.
The day’s defendants returned to the jail with news that this grand jury had dismissed all of the day’s cases but four for lack of evidence, with ignoramus (we do not know) written at the end of each indictment. And the four—two sets of mothers and daughters—were all found not guilty even though two of them had confessed earlier: Margaret Jacobs, her recantation believed at last, with her mother, Rebecca Jacobs, known to be distracted, and old Sarah Buckley with her widowed daughter Mary Whittredge, neither of whom had confessed. Now all of them were to be free or at least free as soon as their rising jail bills could be paid. On the third day the grand jury dismissed even more cases, and only two people stood trial, Job Tookey and Hannah Tyler, both found not guilty.
On Friday more were declared ignoramus, including Candy, the Barbadian slave, and Elizabeth Procter’s son William. Only Mary Tyler was tried, and she too was found not guilty. At this the court broke for the Sabbath.
Mary Warren had been absent from the constant round of hearings and trials. Now back in court, she reacted as before to the movements of the accused, but the justices and even the audience failed to respond with approval or sympathy. Under such conditions it is likely that the spasms no longer felt the same—a different reality or not real at all. Because spectral evidence was not to be accepted, regardless of the actual cause of the convulsions, the court viewed them as either physical ills or the Devil’s deceptions.
Mary might wonder if she were like the girl in Beverly who had been duped into believing a disguised devil was actually the minister’s wife—until Mary Esty’s ghost set her straight. Had Mary Warren herself believed the Devil all along? Far back, months before, she had thought her afflictions were distractions, but the court refused to believe her then, had suspected her when she tried to deny it, until she thought she must have been truly bewitched after all. Her master and mistress had not believed her afflictions, not for a moment. Now Goodman Procter was dead and his wife under a death sentence.
When questioned, the most she could safely attest to was that the defendant looked like the specter she thought she saw. And in this manner, acceptance of Stoughton’s unrelenting judgment continued to crumble.
Court resumed in Salem Tuesday, January 10, minus Wait-Still Winthrop. The grand jury sent Sarah Wardwell, widow of the executed Samuel, and her two daughters to the trial jury, which declared the young women not guilty but found the widowed Goodwife Wardwell guilty as charged. She, her daughters, and her late husband had confessed to witchcraft, and all recanted their self-damning stories, but for some reason the trial jury did not believe Sarah.
Now the mood of the returning prisoners was far more subdued, with hope sharply qualified if not extinguished. Something had changed over the Sabbath break. Perhaps Wait-Still Winthrop, now absent, had been a moderating presence. Perhaps the afflicted girls seemed more believable to the court this time.
On the following day Reverend Dane’s niece Elizabeth Johnson Jr. was tried and also found guilty.
That evening Mercy Lewis suffered afflictions, plagued, she claimed, by several specters. Elizabeth Johnson Jr. was one; the Englishes both also pressed their diabolical demands, especially Mary, who pushed the Devil’s book at her to sign.
Had the Englishes returned as Alden had? Philip and Mary were likely both present on Thursday, January 12, to face the grand jury unless, unlike any of the others, their cases were handled in absentia. Mercy Lewis swore to her account of the previous night’s torture and said, “Mrs English s[ai]d she might bring the Book now she thought ever one of them would bee Cleared.” The girl recoiled as if struck on the breast and gagged as if choked. Specters were hitting her, she said, English and his wife and old Pharaoh—Thomas Farrar, whose case would be declared ignoramus today. They were there in the room, right in front of the grand jury, threatening to strangle her!
William Beale, part of the jury pool, also swore to his visions of Philip English after a disagreement with the man and during Beale’s bout of smallpox.
But the grand jury recognized all this testimony as deriving from spectral evidence and thus discounted it. The surviving indictments are for Mary English tormenting Elizabeth Hubbard on April 22 among other times and for Philip English tormenting Mary Walcott and Elizabeth Booth, “singlewoman,” on May 31 and other times. All of these charges were dismissed as ignoramus. Yet the grand jury sent five Andover women to trial, and of these, Mary Post was found guilty.
On Friday more prisoners, suspects who would still be alive to face a later court, were freed on bail, and suspects already cleared were freed on payment of fees. Fathers and husbands banded together with concerned neighbors to post the £100 bonds (somehow able to cover sums much more than some ministers’ £60 yearly salary).
Perhaps Rebecca Nurse’s family attended the legal proceedings for her sister Sarah Cloyce, who was brought down from the Ipswich jail to face another grand jury on January 13. They would have joined her husband, Peter Cloyce, who stood by her, frequently visiting the Ipswich jail.
The grand jury may have considered the statement from Boston jailer John Arnold and his wife, Mary, that, while Sarah Cloyce and her sister Mary Esty were in their care, both women behaved in a “sobere and civell” manner.
The grand jury certainly saw the indictments against Goodwife Cloyce for tormenting her niece Rebecca Towne on September 9 and for spectrally assaulting Mary Walcott and Abigail Williams on April 11 at the first hearing. (Oddly no indictment survives for tormenting Annie Putnam on that same April day.) For some reason, perhaps the change in public opinion, her grand jury hearing in September had been continued or postponed.
They weighed the accounts along with whatever actions afflicted witnesses who were present in court may have exhibited, if any—and disregarded them all. Foreman Robert Payne wrote ignoramus on each document. Sarah was free to go as soon as her jail and court expenses were paid. The family must have settled her bill quickly, for Peter removed them both to Boston, away from her accusers, as soon as he could.
Mary Lacey Jr., her grandmother dead in jail of illness a month ago and her mother found guilty and awaiting execution, returned to fulfill the condition of her own October release. As she had been a confessor and energetic accuser, the grand jury passed her case along to the trial jury despite her later recantation. She pled not guilty to the charges—of signing the Devil’s book and of tormenting Timothy Swan—and once again the jury passed a verdict of not guilty. And that was the last of the Essex County trials until the next Superior Court, which would reconvene in May.
Stoughton, however, signed a death warrant for the three found guilty in the January session: widow Sarah Wardwell and the two young women (described by one of the trials’ critics as “senseless and ignorant creatures”). Then, relentlessly methodical, he added the names of the others found guilty in the earlier trials: Mary Bradbury (if they could find her, for she was still in hiding), Abigail Hobbs, Dorcas Hoar (her month’s reprieve to settle her soul long over), Mary Lacey Sr., Abigail Faulkner Sr., and widow Elizabeth Procter. The hangings were apparently scheduled for February 1, the same day that the Superior Court’s next session would begin in Charlestown for Middlesex County. In the meantime workmen dug graves in the frost-hard ground near the gallows site.
Goodwives Faulkner and Procter, both with child, might find their deaths delayed, but Elizabeth was nearer her time, and before the day scheduled for the next execution, the pangs of birth gripped her and she delivered her latest child in the Salem prison on January 27.
Unlike Mistress
Ann Putnam, Elizabeth Procter lacked the traditional groaning cakes and groaning beer to treat her helpers. She lacked the childbed linens and the family cradle to receive this child. Instead, she struggled on an earth floor covered with (not necessarily clean) straw. Perhaps the other women prisoners clustered round to help, if their chains did not prevent such movement. Perhaps one of them was a midwife, or perhaps the law sent for a midwife to attend her. In any case Elizabeth survived and named the child John after his father, even though he had a half-brother already named John—little help, though, that one had been. Nothing now prevented Elizabeth’s death sentence from being carried out. Goodwife Faulkner had not yet given birth, but Elizabeth could now be included with the next group of prisoners destined to die.
Mary Warren, probably kept apart with the other confessors, would have heard the commotion attending the birth and the news that Elizabeth had survived her travail. Mary’s reaction—whether satisfaction at Goody Procter’s impending peril or remorse for her own part in it—is, like so much of history, lost.
Prisoners from Middlesex County towns found themselves removed from Salem’s jail and carted away to stand eventual trial in Charlestown. The condemned prisoners left behind could only pray and try to settle their souls to face death and God’s own more merciful judgment. Outside, a driving snow fell the week of January 22, and the next week it melted in a thaw.
Then, on the day they were to be hauled to the gallows, or the day before, the condemned learned that Governor Phips had countermanded Stoughton’s orders and reprieved them; they would not hang—or at least they would not hang that day or anytime soon. Their futures were still uncertain, but their relief must have been profound.
More surprising news arrived later when they learned that the reprieves had stunned Chief Justice Stoughton. News that he had lost his temper in court and stormed off the bench to confront the governor in a blazing row would have spread as swiftly as gossip could gallop. Mary Warren and Ann Putnam would have found this development alarming—what did it mean for them? The Nurse family and other Towne relatives would have been not only relieved but most likely gleeful as well—at last justified, though admittedly after so much innocent blood had been spilled.
In Stoughton’s absence this court found no one guilty of witchcraft.
On Monday, February 7, Rebecca’s son Samuel Nurse received a visit from a church committee: Reverend Samuel Parris, deacons Nathaniel Ingersoll and Edward Putnam, Nathaniel Putnam, John Putnam Sr., and old Bray Wilkins. For months now, the committee explained, Goodman Nurse, along with three others, had been absent from public worship in the Village Church. He was a member, after all, a fully communing member, and yet he had been absent even from the Lord’s Supper. The brethren had chosen the committee to speak privately with him and the other absentees. (Allowing a person speak their side of a question before taking an infraction to the rest of the membership was general church policy.) Samuel Nurse made no explanation but agreed to a meeting the following afternoon at the parsonage.
The committee left to take their message to Samuel’s brother-in-law, John Tarbell and to Thomas Wilkins, Bray’s son. The fourth absent church member was Peter Cloyce, but he and his wife, Sarah, were now living in Boston. Someone, probably the Nurse kin, must have sent word to him about the committee’s visit, and the three local dissenters presumably discussed this new development. The more they thought about it, the angrier they became.
They had been absent from the weekly services in the Village Church—for the most part, that is, as Tarbell had had his son baptized in October. They had avoided even the Sacrament of communion, but their intent was not to slight the meaning of the ceremony, much less disregard the great sacrifice that Christ had made for them, as epitomized by the service. No, their quarrel was with their neighbors and, especially, with the minister—as the committee ought to have known. Ever since people had begun accusing Rebecca—their mother, mother-in-law, neighbor—and the minister not only did nothing to stop it but actually believed and encouraged the accusations, they had been too apprehensive of being accused themselves to attend services in the Village. They ceased taking communion in the Village Church in order to avoid sharing the bread and wine with neighbors intent on sending innocent women—their mother and aunts—to their deaths. They would not accept the bread and wine from the person who ought to have calmed the panic and exposed such error but instead, for his own reasons, chose to inflame the conflagration.
Tarbell, Nurse, and Wilkins arrived at Parris’s home the next day two hours early for the appointment. The minister agreed to speak with them anyway, if they wished, one at a time, in his study before the rest of the committee arrived. Tarbell went first, following Parris up the stairs while the others waited below. If Parris thought he could offer advice to a troubled soul or divide and conquer the opposition piecemeal, he found himself mistaken. Tarbell pounced and would not let his minister get a word in edgewise. The wait downstairs must have been uncomfortable for Parris’s family, as Tarbell’s angry voice would have pervaded the parsonage.
After an hour the two men—neither could have looked happy—descended the stairs, and Samuel Nurse headed for Parris’s study for his say. He had the same complaints as his brother-in-law. (All three of them did, according to Parris’s account of the meetings.) Anger stoked by a summer of fear and frustration boiled over as Nurse unburdened himself of what he had been too cautious to say for so many months. He accused Parris of idolatry for asking the afflicted what they saw, for believing wholeheartedly in what they said, for believing those dubious messages from the Invisible World. And then for giving his oath in court, swearing that the invisible specters of specific people knocked down the girls and claiming that the defendants’ touch then healed them—all actions that contradicted the precepts of the faith and Biblical scholarship he himself professed. If it had not been for Parris, he said, getting to the heart of the matter, his mother might never have been hanged, might still be alive. But she had been—thanks to Parris’s unfounded and unjustified persecution. And because Parris had yet to admit his grave error, when wiser men than he had done so, then Nurse could not—would not—join him in worship.
The most Parris had opportunity to reply was that he did not yet see any reason to change his views, which, as he saw it, were confirmed by “known and ancient experience frequent in such cases.” If they were going to quarrel, then they must allow him to present his side of the matter.
Before Wilkins could have a turn, the rest of the church committee arrived. At that the three fell silent, and when Parris formally asked them to state why they had withdrawn from “religious communication,” giving them the chance to air their complaints before their fellows, they would not say and, despite prodding from Parris, asked only for another meeting and time to consider the committee’s demands.
The next day Peter Cloyce showed up at the parsonage to make the same complaints and received the same answers as the others. All four appeared unannounced a short while later, this time bringing William Way, a member of the congregation but not a fully communing church member. If the four were bringing a witness to a formal grievance, then they needed two or three full church members. Parris informed them that he intended to follow the letter of the procedure for such problems, and this was not the procedure.
Cloyce did not stay in the Village for the February 16 meeting, but the other three did attend. On that occasion Samuel Nurse read a paper wherein they claimed to have proceeded in an orderly manner to protest “the burden of great grievances by reason of some unwarrantable actings of Mr. Parris,” but they felt that they were being prevented from stating their complaints, and if that continued, then they would have to air the problem to the whole church, not just this committee. Reluctantly, they allowed Parris to copy their statement and pleaded ignorance of the procedure, but they did not publicly state the grievances they had poured forth in Parris’s study. (Parris did not present these damning complaints to the committee ei
ther, though he recorded them in his church record.)
Whether Parris’s niece Abigail Williams was still ill, still afflicted, when these tense meetings occurred in the parsonage is unclear. She may have been the unnamed girl who, after seeing a coffin when attempting forbidden fortune-telling, died young. Presumably Betty Parris and her younger sister Susanna and brother Thomas were well. Was John Indian still a member of the household, and did the family have another servant, free or enslaved, to replace Tituba? If physical illness still besieged Abigail, then Parris would have been understandably less inclined to alter his view of witchcraft and his role in the recent purge—reasons besides pride as well as the terrible admission of being as mistaken as he had been and at such cost to the community that he was charged to shepherd. After all, at least three supposedly afflicted people had died recently in Andover: old Ralph Farnum on January 8; young Timothy Swan, so often tormented by Mary Bradbury’s specter, on February 2; and fourteen-year-old Rose Foster on February 25.
The meetings would drag on into the spring, while at the same time the rates committee refused, as they had for two years so far, to collect Parris’s salary. Francis Nurse no longer served on that committee, but his son-in-law John Tarbell did and defiantly paid the fine the Quarterly Court imposed on the committee for neglecting its duties. Nurse, Tarbell, and Wilkins kept changing the terms for the meetings they asked for and also consulted with sympathetic neighbors, witnesses who were not full members of the church. This in effect omitted the interchurch stage of their complaints and treated the matter as one concerning the death of Rebecca as well as her sister and the other dead and all the misery the trials had created. If their absence from the Sacrament was broached, they explained the neglect as being due to the inappropriateness of accepting so important a symbol from the blood-tainted hands of one they blamed for their mother’s death by hanging. Perhaps their reluctance to speak their minds before the church committee indicated a lack of preparedness, an awareness that their explosions of temper in Parris’s study were spontaneous, releases of pent-up rage that their confounding predicament fueled. They aimed their resentment at Parris, an outsider to the Village who had been precariously placed in the community from the onset, rather than at the neighbors who had accused and testified against Rebecca, people with whom they still had to live. A minister could move away (despite the ordination that was intended to make the association with a congregation permanent), but the likes of Thomas Putnam’s family they could not get rid of. In the case of Parris they could argue for his removal.
Six Women of Salem Page 41
