1697.] THE CLOSE OF THE WAR. 449 in Indian warfare such places were only "nests of destruction." It was a constant provocation to the French of Canada, who were determined to take and destroy it. A force of two ships of war, with two companies of soldiers, under Iberville, to be reinforced by Baron Castin with Indians, was sent against it. On the way Iberville encountered two English ships of war, the Newport and the Sorlings, and a cutter belonging to the Province of Massachusetts. The Newport he took, the others escaped in a fog. At the mouth of the Penobscot Castin joined the expedition with two hundred savages in a fleet of canoes. This formidable force invested Pemaquid, and summoned it to surrender. The fortress had a garrison of a hundred men, ammunition and food enough to stand a siege, and mounted fifteen guns. The first summons was rejected; but in the night the French set up a battery on shore, and on the second day threw shot and shell into the town and fort. Castin threatened that if the place was taken by storm it should be given up to the plunder of the savages. Captain Chubbs, the commander, yielded, and threw open his gates. The garrison was only saved from massacre by being taken to an island in the harbor and put under a guard of French marines. But the fort was demolished and the town plundered. Chubbs may have only meant to save the lives of his men, but he was, nevertheless, tried for cowardice on his return to Boston, and cashiered.1 At Dover three persons were killed returning home from divine service. Belknap relates the remarkable escape of Exeter in the summer of 1697. A number of Indians were concealed near the town waiting for an opportunity. By a stroke of foolish good luck some women and children took that very time to go into the fields for strawberries, and would not be prevented. Somebody in town fired a gun to scare them back; but the report scared the Indians also, who retreated, supposing that they had been discovered. But on the 4th of July End of the of that year they killed Major Frost, at Kittery, thus clos- war. ing a piteous list of massacres, and making the circle of their revenge complete by the death of an officer who was concerned in Major Waldron's sham-fight at Dover. This, probably, was the last Indian shot fired in New Hampshire during the war. In 1698 the Peace of Ryswick restrained the Indians from further hostilities. Many of the captives were returned, but a good many preferred to remain, and thus started a race of half-breeds to be most dangerous enemies in future wars. VOL. II. 1 Sewall's Ancient Dominions of Maine. Annals of Salem. 29 CHAPTER XIX. THE WITCHCRAFT DELUSION. OUTBREAK OF THE WITCHCRAFT DELUSION. ITS EARLIER HISTORY. - CAUSES OF THE important and interesting political events ending with Phips's return from England with the new charter - following the close of Philip's War, had hardly ceased to agitate the colonies, when there came, especially upon Massachusetts, a dispensation more gloomy and terrible than marked any other period of the century. It cannot, indeed, be said that the witchcraft panic, which broke out in 1692, was a result of Puritan theology, or due to the sombre and intolerant temperament which its doctrines nourished. The belief in a diabolical possession is coextensive with and as old as the human 1484.] ITS EARLIER HISTORY. 451 race. Its superstitions, it is true, have been colored by the culture of different epochs, and by different developments of the religious sentiment. But no religion has ever succeeded in so filtering the popular mind as to let the so-called facts of witchcraft drop as dregs to the bottom. If the Puritanism of New England was as powerless as other religious systems to enlighten the ordinary intelligence, its faith, nevertheless, in the intimate nearness of the supernatural, made its followers peculiarly susceptible to the delusion which, under the name of witchcraft, so overwhelmed the colony. It may, however, be said on their behalf that never yet has the belief of a supernatural interference in the affairs of men, distinct from the omnipotent and omniscient rule, been rooted out of the human mind. It lurks even now, not merely among half-civilized peoples, but in the habits and practices of the most cultivated nations, wherever the inevitable combination of credulity and ignorance invites it. Certain obscure facts of a physico-nervous character have always drawn the attention of mankind, and suggested thoughts of supernatural causes. Whenever the accidental and abnormal traits of the human organization are not understood, they are invariably interpreted in a preternatural sense. The sufferers are victims of invisible agencies; the names which have been invented for these run along a whole gamut from heathen and classical times to the mediæval imps and the modern Satan. It is not at all surprising that people should endeavor to protect themselves against something uncanny which they do not understand. Perhaps the modern animosity against reputed witches was first fomented by the Bull of Pope Innocent VIII., in 1484, to Earlier hisarrest persons suspected of witchcraft. In 1485 forty-one witchcraft tory of the delusion. old women were burnt in Burlia, denounced for something that was only crabbedness of disposition, oddity of habit, repulsiveness of appearance, - traits which perhaps they used to threaten or to affright. These marks have always sufficed to send odd and lonely old women to the stake or gallows. Massachusetts did not invent mankind's great trepidation. One hundred persons were condemned by one inquisition in Piedmont, and forty-eight in Ravensburg. In 1515 five hundred were executed at Geneva in the space of three months. These are merely random specimens of the medieval temper. It was the same in all other countries, and under Protestant as well as Catholic religions. If Luther, worn out by too protracted study, could conjure the Devil out of the air of his apartment, what must have been the visions and frights of peasants and burghers? Probably no amount of ink thrown at that dark personage will ever expel him from the fancy. It was in the twelfth century that the notion of a witch, as a woman who had made a secret compact with Satan, who gave her power to ride through the air to attend a witch's meeting, first appeared. This survived to be the chief modern qualification of a witch. She could perform various other preternatural feats, vex, blast, blight, and kill. Her genius was always guided by malice, but the aeronautic faculty was her distinction. People suspected of this were sacrificed in Europe by thousands, so deep a terror had seized hold of the popular mind. The more sensitive woman, subject to hysteria, to religious and epidemical influences, to obscure affections of the nerves, was the principal sufferer, always the Joan of Arc of the popular ignorance. Witchcraft In the reign of Henry VIII. there were a few executions for witchcraft in England, under a law of 1541, which was soon rein England. pealed. Ever since the reign of King John there had been trials for witchcraft, and probably executions. In 1537, Lady Glammis of the Douglas family was burnt alive as a witch; but, as in the case of Joan of Arc, political motives were mixed up in the act. Scotch witchery was connected with the use of herbs, salves, remedies, and charms: attempts at unbinding, that is, healing, were punishable. In Aberdeen, in 1597, one man and twenty-three women were burnt. In the same place there was an outery of witchcraft in 1617, and twenty-seven women were burnt in that year. In 1559 the English Parliament passed a law against witchcraft, and again in 1563, which remained in force till it was repealed in 1736. Bishop Jewel, in a sermon before Queen Elizabeth, who used to frequent Dr. Dee's conjuring shop for consultation, informed her that witches and sorcerers were marvellously increased in her realm. In 1575 many were hung at Barking; in 1579, three at Chelmsford, four at Abingdon, two at Cambridge; in 1582, thirteen at St. Osith's, and so on, with melancholy frequency. Matthew Hopkins, in 1644-1646, undertook the function of Witchfinder. He laid down rules and reduced the hunting of witches to a science, while Harvey, Wallis, Wilkins, Boyle, were founding the Royal Society. It is pleasant to know that he found too many witches: the people became disgusted and alarmed, and mobbed him into obscurity. His most lucrative witchyear was 1645, when about ninety were hanged. The trials were held before Sir Matthew Hale, a devout believer in witchcraft. So were Dr. More and Sir Thomas Brown. Hobbes was undecided. Cudworth used to listen to reputed witches, to test them by their ability to recite the Common Prayer and the Apostle's Creed. The Lord's Prayer was a later test. Lord Bacon prescribed the ingredients for a witch's ointment. Even Selden, famous lover of liberty, said that 1661.] ITS EARLIER HISTORY. 453 if witchcraft were a delusion, still crimes of the imagination might be punished with death, because realities were not more deadly in their consequences. Boyle inclined to a belief in it; Archbishop Cranmer put a witch-clause into his Articles of Visitation. In 1593 the income of £40, derived from the confiscated property of three persons executed for witchcraft, was appropriated for an annual lecture upon its enormity, to be preached by a Doctor or Bachelor of Divinity, of Queen's College, Cambridge; and the custom continued for one hundred and twenty-five years.1 A class of witch-finders was created by the popular demand who were very active. Like judges, they used to go on the cir- Witch-findcuit; the town-crier would make proclamation and order ers. up the witch-cases before them. Finders realized so much per head on all persons convicted, and free passage to and fro. It was the best speculative business of the time, when a man like Edward Fairfax, the translator of Tasso, whose children were subject to fits, prosecuted six of his neighbors for bewitching them. In 1655 Dalton's "Country Justice" lays down the legal signs by which the victim may be held for trial. The witch-names used by Shakespeare were found in the Manual of W. W., which was printed in 1582. In 1693 a great many trials were held before Chief Justice Holt. He kept a clear brain through the business, and was the first public man in office who protected the accused. Then the superstition began to decline in England: the last capital trial occurred in 1712. But in Scotland it was 1727 before the last witch was burned. Perhaps the worst time in England for witches was in 1661, the year after the Restoration. Fourteen commissions were issued for trying them, 1 Judd's History of Hadley. The general subject is indebted to Michelet's La Sorcière; Lecky's History of Rationalism; Smedley, Thompson, Rich, and others, Occult Sciences; Drake's ed. of Calef's Witchcraft Delusion in New England; South Meadows, or the Days of Witchcraft, by E. T. Disoway; Upham's Salem Witchcraft; Thomas Brattle's Account, Mass. Hist. Coll.: Mather's Wonders of the Invisible World; Hutchinson's Historical Essay; Thomas Wright's Narrative of Sorcery and Magic. 2 "I told the Bishop of Worcester that his diocese is infected with notions about witches; he intends his clergy shall rectify their mistakes in that particular. He told me some of the topics he would have argued. He don't much controvert the power of devils in the Gentile world, and their extraordinary operations may still take place among the Pagans. He is inclinable enough to believe what some authors have writ of the strange effects in such places; but he thinks the Gospel, as far as it reaches, has destroyed the works of the devil, and those who are in the covenant of grace can receive no hurt from the infernal powers, either in their persons, children or goods; that a man may be so profligate as to give himself to the devil, but he can have no assistance from him to hurt anybody else in a supernatural way. I think we may assent to this latter part, and leave the devil and the Gentiles to argue the rest among themselves." Letter of James Vernon, King Wil liam's Secretary of State, to the Duke of Shrewsbury, written in June, 1699. But at that time even Englishmen of broad intelligence and unsectarian feeling could go no further than this. The common clergy of all sects were advocates of witchcraft. |