A Treasury of Great American Scandals (30 page)

Most citizens were grateful to the girls for helping deliver them from the evil infestation and eagerly anticipated the upcoming trials that would rid Salem of such wickedness once and for all. Any hope the accused may have had that justice would prevail when their cases came before a new panel of trial judges—most of whom were not from Salem—was quickly dashed. As far as the court was concerned, the facts were already established during the pretrial examinations. “There was little occasion to prove witchcraft,” noted Cotton Mather, “this being evident and notorious to all beholders.”

Bridget Bishop, the flashy tavern keeper, was among the first to stand trial. She didn't stand a chance. For starters, a panel of female examiners had discovered a “witch's tet” between “ye pudendum and anus.” She also visited witnesses in various shapes, like a black pig, and once with the body of a monkey, the feet of a cock, and the face of a man. There was other horrifying evidence as well, and Bridget Bishop was duly condemned and hanged from the branches of a great oak tree.

Rebecca Nurse was next. The jury seemed to have the same reservations about her guilt as Magistrate John Hawthorne initially had several months before at the preliminary examination. She just didn't seem like witch material. The jury's doubts were fueled by the recommendations of a group of ministers who had been consulted after Bridget Bishop's trial. They established some new, more enlightened standards of judgment, recommending, for instance, that “exquisite caution” be taken in considering spectral evidence, and that conviction should be based on something “more considerable than the accused persons being represented by a spectre unto the afflicted.” They also urged “an exceeding tenderness” toward “persons formerly of an unblemished reputation.”

Rebecca Nurse certainly met the new guidelines; her piety and goodness were attested to by more than a score of respectable citizens. The jury was convinced and voted for acquittal. The girls, however, were not pleased with the verdict. It meant their witch radars were being called into question. Their displeasure was made known by furious roars and convulsions, and the spectacle was enough to give the judges pause. Perhaps the jury had made a mistake. “I will not impose on the jury,” announced Chief Justice William Stoughton, “but I must ask you if you considered one statement made by the prisoner. When Deliverance Hobbs was brought into court to testify, the prisoner, turning her head to her, said, ‘What, do you bring her? She is one of us.' Has the jury weighed the implications of this statement?” As a matter of fact, they had not, mainly because none of them remembered hearing it. The only thing to do now was to ask the defendant to explain herself. Only problem was, with the continuing uproar of the girls, the buzz in the courtroom, and the fact that Rebecca Nurse was practically deaf, she failed to hear the question directed at her. Oblivious, she stared straight ahead. This was eerie-enough behavior in the minds of the jury, already becoming more and more convinced by the agonized reaction of the girls that they had made a terrible misjudgment in acquitting this strange woman. It was now apparent to the panel that the defendant's “one of us” reference had been an involuntary admission of guilt. Accordingly, they revised their verdict.

Now that she had been condemned under the law, the leaders of her church made sure she was condemned by God as well. In a formal ceremony, into which the old lady had to be carried, they excommunicated her, thereby insuring her soul's eternal damnation. Yet while the rest of the community abandoned her to her fate, her children did not. They appealed to the governor, laying before him all the evidence of their mother's innocence. Phips took pity on them and signed a reprieve. Rebecca Nurse had been saved from a hideous fate, or so it seemed. After signing the reprieve, Phips received some distressing news from Salem. Rebecca Nurse had sent her shape to kill her accusers, and some were already on the verge of death. Did the governor really want to spare the source of such wickedness? the people wanted to know. Could he live with the deaths of these innocent children while this guilty witch went free? The answer was no, and the reprieve was canceled. Rebecca Nurse would hang after all.

The execution took place on Saturday, July 19, 1692. Five women were hanged that day, including Sarah Good, the feisty pipe smoker who had been among the first accused. She did not go quietly. The attending minister appealed to her to save her soul and confess, reminding her that she knew very well that she was a witch. “You're a liar!” Sarah shouted back. “I am no more a witch than you are a wizard! If you take my life away, God will give you blood to drink.”

After the corpses were taken down from the gallows, they were buried in a shallow grave nearby. But the children of Rebecca Nurse dug up her body later that night and took it home for a dignified, though secret, burial. It was their final act of kindness to the mother they loved and fought in vain to save.

Seeing the fate of their fellow defendants convinced some of the accused that there would be no mercy when their time came. They had to act immediately to save themselves. Some, like John Alden, managed to escape from prison and flee Massachusetts. Mostly poor and without resources, many were quickly recaptured. John Proctor tried to save his life by addressing a petition to five ministers in Boston on behalf of himself and the others. In it he appealed to them to use their influence and have the trials moved to Boston, or, if that were not possible, at least to substitute other judges, the present incumbents “having condemned us already before our trials.” Proctor also advised the ministers that “full and free confessions” were being wrung out of the male suspects by torture. “These actions,” he wrote, “are very like the Papish cruelties.” This odious comparison to the Church of Rome would be enough to rile any good Puritan, and resulted in several of Proctor's relatives being hauled in as witches.

The petition did get the interest of some powerful people in Boston, though. Increase Mather, the president of Harvard (and Cotton's father), called a conference of several ministers in Cambridge to discuss the pesky question of spectral evidence. His proposition was, “Whether the devil may not sometimes have permission to represent an innocent person as tormenting such as are under diabolic manifestation.” The ministers, pondering the question with all their collective wisdom, agreed that the shapes of innocent people might be manipulated by Satan, but “that such things are rare and extraordinary.” Increase Mather traveled to Salem to check out the witch trials for himself, though the fate of his petitioner John Proctor was not his primary interest. George Burroughs was. “Had I been one of his judges,” Mather later noted of the Burroughs trial, “I could not have acquitted him.” And neither could the jury. Burroughs and Proctor, along with three others, were sentenced to hang.

The condemned were placed in a cart and driven through the streets of Salem Village to the place of execution. All eyes were on Burroughs as he stood on the scaffold and spoke his final words. They were so simple and moving that some in the gathered crowd wept. Burroughs concluded by reciting the Lord's Prayer, which caused a loud murmuring among the assembled. Everyone knew a witch wasn't supposed to be able to say this prayer. Was an innocent man about to hang? Responding to the crowd's mounting agitation, one of the accusers yelled out that she had seen the devil at the condemned man's shoulder whispering the prayer into his ear. This would have explained it, except the girl apparently forgot that the devil couldn't say the prayer either. The crowd surged forward as Burroughs mounted the ladder, almost as if they were preparing to seize him away.

Fortunately, Cotton Mather, the authority on the ways of the devil, was there to save the day. He reminded the people that Satan is never so subtle than when he appears like an angel of light. Besides, Burroughs was not even an ordained minister. Though the point was irrelevant, and Reverend Mather failed to explain why the condemned wizard was able to recite the Lord's Prayer, his words quieted the crowd and the execution proceeded. Still, George Burroughs haunted the people for years to come, and Cotton Mather later wrote that he wished he had never heard “the first letters of his name.”

The executions of Burroughs and the rest were followed a month later by eight more, including those of Martha Cory, whose husband Giles had been pressed to death three days earlier for having “stood mute” in the face of the charges against him, and Rebecca Nurse's younger sister, Mary Esty. After her condemnation, Mary Esty made a final appeal to the judges: “I petition to your Honours, not for my own life, for I know I must die, and my appointed time is set, but . . . that no more Innocent Blood be shed, which undoubtedly cannot be avoided in the way and course you go in. I question not by your Honours do to the utmost of your pains in the discovery and detection of witchcraft and witches; but by my own Innocency I know you are in the wrong way.”

Mary Esty and the others executed with her on September 22 were the last to die in the insanity that swept over Massachusetts in 1692. Others would be tried, but reason was slowly returning. Spectral evidence was abolished as a basis for accusation, resulting in mass acquittals, and Governor Phips freed the remaining suspects, numbering more than a hundred, the following spring. “Such a jail delivery,” wrote Thomas Hutchison, “has never been known in New England.” Freedom came at a price, though. The released prisoners were expected to pay all the expenses of their incarceration, and those who couldn't remained behind bars.

Gradually, life in Salem returned to some semblance of normalcy. “The afflicted ones” quietly withdrew from the deadly spectacle they had created. Some repented; others reportedly went on to lead lives of ill repute. Farms neglected for much of that unquiet year were sown again, while severed relationships and damaged reputations were slowly restored. Yet few could ever forget what had happened. “We walked in clouds and could not see our way,” wrote Reverend John Hale. “And we have most cause to be humbled for error . . . which cannot be retrieved.”

The Man Who Would Be Queen

 

 

 

Prior to the Revolution, most Americans were still loyal to the British crown. But Edward Hyde, Lord Cornbury, the royal governor of New York, seems to have taken his allegiance to the queen a bit to the extreme. By some accounts, Lord Cornbury, who governed from 1702 to 1708, believed that since he was the colonial representative of Queen Anne (Britain's monarch of the time), he bloody well ought to look like her. The result wasn't pretty. A portrait on display at the New-York Historical Society identified as Lord Cornbury shows him dressed in all his female finery. The image of majesty is marred somewhat by the five o'clock shadow, but otherwise the governor looks every bit the queen.
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In 1786, Sylvester Douglas, Lord Glenbervie, recorded in his diary a conversation he had with Horace Walpole, son of the great English statesman Robert Walpole, a contemporary of Cornbury's. “[Lord Cornbury] was a clever man,” Glenbervie was told. “His great insanity was dressing himself as a woman. [Walpole] says that when Governor in America he opened the Assembly dressed in that fashion. When some of those about him remonstrated, his reply was, ‘You are very stupid not to see the propriety of it. In this place and particularly on this occasion I represent a woman and ought in all respects to represent her as faithfully as I can.' ”

Some of Lord Cornbury's contemporaries failed to appreciate his extravagant displays of loyalty. “Tis said he is wholly addicted to his pleasure . . . ,” Robert Livingston wrote to London in 1707. “His dressing in womens Cloths Commonly [every?] morning is so unaccountable that if hundred[s] of spectators did not daily see him it would be incredible.” New York catechist Elias Neau had something similar to say: “My Lord Cornbury has and does still make use of an unfortunate Custom of dressing himself in Womens Cloaths and of exposing himself in the Garb upon the Ramparts to the view of the public; in that dress he draws a World of Spectators about him and consequently as many Censures, especially for exposing himself in such a manner all the great Holy days and even in an hour or two after going to the Communion.”

There are no surviving accounts of what Queen Anne thought of Lord Cornbury's homage to her, but given that they were both rather homely, as well as first cousins, she may have been struck by the resemblance—and not especially flattered.

Cellar Dweller

 

 

 

“Give me liberty or give me death,” Patrick Henry famously demanded on the eve of the American Revolution. His wife, Sarah, might have said the same thing, since she was confined in the basement of the couple's Virginia estate for almost four years. Not that the accommodations were all that bad. “It was an English-style basement,” insists Edith Poindexter, an historian with the Patrick Henry Memorial Foundation. That means it was partially aboveground, letting in plenty of light and fresh air. “Warm in the winter and cool in the summer,” says Poindexter. Yet it wasn't quite the Ritz, especially when Sarah found herself in a straitjacket. What had driven the poor woman to such an unfortunate state?

It seems her children were part of the problem. She had five of them, starting when she was seventeen, but after the birth of the sixth in 1771, Sarah lost it. She exhibited what Patrick Henry biographer Robert Meade calls “a strange antipathy” toward her children. It might be called postpartum psychosis today. Sarah's “antipathy” became so dangerous that she had to be kept away from the kids. But Patrick Henry was a loyal husband and knew how horrific insane asylums of the day could be. So, the family lived upstairs while Sarah ranted and raved below. It was in this sad state that she died in 1775 at age thirty-seven.