The Nurses might also have contended that a specter could appear in the shape of an innocent person. The “Return of Several Ministers” and Samuel Willard’s June 19 sermon, with their insistence that the devil could indeed create apparitions representing guiltless parties, had surely aroused considerable comment among the knowledgeable. Accordingly, it was probably during Nurse’s trial (where that point was most relevant) that, Robert Calef later reported, “one of the Accusers cried out publickly of Mr
. Willard
Minister in
Boston,
as afflicting of her.” Willard’s sermon would have attracted the accusers’ attention, given the threat it posed to the credibility of their charges. But the judges, several of whom were members of Willard’s congregation, would not entertain the accusation. “She was sent out of the Court,” Calef recorded, “and it was told about she was mistaken in the person.” As was true of Mistress Margaret Thacher, Samuel Willard’s prominence protected him from the serious consequences of a witchcraft charge.
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The petty jury, returning after deliberations of unknown length, initially announced a verdict of not guilty. According to Calef, the accusers “made a hideous out-cry” when they heard the outcome, and the judges also appeared “strangely surprized.” One “exprest himself not satisfied,” another “said they would have her indicted anew.” Then Stoughton took the matter in hand. Insisting that he “would not Impose upon the Jury,” he nevertheless asked if the jurors had sufficiently considered something Goody Nurse “let slip” during her trial. When Deliverance and Abigail Hobbs came into court to testify against her, Rebecca had exclaimed, “What, do these persons give in Evidence against me now, they used to come among us.” The chief judge deemed those words an implicit confession of guilt. The jurors went out to reconsider, but they could not agree on a verdict. Thomas Fiske, the foreman, asked that Goody Nurse be permitted to explain her meaning, so the jury returned to the courtroom to request clarification. But Rebecca remained silent, being (as she later indicated) “something hard of hearing, and full of grief,” and so, declared Fiske, “these words were to me a principal Evidence against her.” She was accordingly convicted. Until it was too late, the jury did not hear Goody Nurse’s explanation that she “intended no otherways, than as they were Prisoners with us, and therefore did then, and yet do judge them not legal Evidence against their fellow Prisoners.”
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Even after the verdict, the Nurse family did not abandon their campaign to save Rebecca. Her relatives asked Fiske for an explanation of the jury’s change of heart; they elicited her own written statement of why she had not answered the crucial question; and they obtained copies of relevant court documents from Stephen Sewall. They probably presented all these materials to Governor William Phips with their request for a reprieve, which he initially granted. But, recorded Calef, “the Accusers renewed their dismal outcries against her,” and “some
Salem
Gentlemen” [Hathorne? Corwin? Gedney?] then persuaded him to rescind it.
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Robert Calef pronounced the original verdict “remarkable,” but that was so only in the context of 1692. Earlier New England juries would surely have reached the same conclusion on the basis of similar evidence. The conviction of Rebecca Nurse, not her initial acquittal, constituted the truly “remarkable” event in June 1692. In ordinary times, her status as a church member and her generally good reputation would have protected her from (for instance) anything more than sporadic gossip about her mother or quiet repetitions of Sarah Holton’s suspicions about the cause of her husband Benjamin’s death. Not only would Goody Nurse not have been convicted in previous decades, she most likely would never even have faced formal witchcraft charges. Moreover, in the unlikely event of a trial, she undoubtedly would have found the judges her allies, not her antagonists, for historically juries had been more eager than judges to convict suspects.
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What differed in 1692 was not simply William Stoughton’s influential insistence that a specter could not represent an innocent person, and his consequent outspoken belief in the guilt of anyone who was so represented. Calef described two other justices as also dissatisfied with the initial verdict, and further emphasized that “some
Salem
Gentlemen” (not Stoughton, who was from Dorchester) had persuaded the governor to annul his reprieve. Goody Nurse’s conviction constitutes one of the most persuasive pieces of evidence that the Massachusetts authorities in general believed unhesitatingly in the truth of the witchcraft allegations. These men, members of the council as well as judges of the Court of Oyer and Terminer, were by midsummer heavily invested in the belief that Satan lay behind the troubles then besetting their colony. And with good reason: if the devil was active in the land, how could they—mere mortals outwitted by the evil angel’s many stratagems and wiles—be responsible for their failure to defend Maine and its residents adequately? Unable to defeat Satan in the forests and garrisons of the northeastern frontier, they could nevertheless attempt to do so in the Salem courtroom.
After the difficulties presented by the prosecution of Rebecca Nurse, Thomas Newton and the justices and jurors were probably relieved to turn to the case of Elizabeth Jackson Howe of Topsfield, who had been formally accused and examined in late May. On Thursday, June 30, both the grand and petty juries heard testimony against Goody Howe, much of which involved charges of maleficium. Just as in the case of Bridget Bishop, the Salem Village afflicted played a relatively minor role in Howe’s accusation and later in her trial. The two indictments charged Elizabeth Howe with afflicting Mercy Lewis and Mary Walcott, but the “sundrey other Acts of witchcraft” also encompassed within their wording constituted the bulk of the evidence against her.
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In
Wonders of the Invisible World,
Cotton Mather revealed that the judges employed a touch test during this trial, observing that in the “greatest Swoon” of the afflicted, “they distinguished her
Touch
from other Peoples, being thereby raised out of them.” He also indicated that the “present Sufferers” had seen “Ghosts” that accused Howe of killing them. Even so, the most compelling testimony came from Howe’s neighbors, detailing fears of her that went back more than a decade. The most serious charge accused Elizabeth Howe of having bewitched and murdered the young daughter of Samuel and Ruth Perley in the early 1680s. That allegation, which was widely known and discussed in many households, obstructed Goody Howe’s application to join the Ipswich church and seems to have set off a wave of gossip that generated stories involving bewitched horses and beer. At the same time, however, a number of statements submitted to the court attested to Elizabeth Howe’s good character; several witnesses declared that she forgave those who accused her of being a witch. The judges and jurors were not convinced; she too was found guilty.
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A similar case—the prosecution of a “usual suspect” in which the afflicted Villagers were only peripherally involved—was considered by the grand jury that same Thursday, then tried two days later on Saturday, July 2. Sarah Averill Wilds, another Topsfield resident, was apparently first publicly named as a witch in Abigail Hobbs’s April 19 confession. Still, in front of the grand jury on June 30 both Ann Jr. and Mary Walcott swore that Goody Wilds’s specter had initially afflicted them weeks before that, in early March (Ann) or early April (Mary). This time, the girls’ adult supporters failed to confirm the alleged chronology. In a carefully worded statement, Thomas Putnam and Nathaniel Ingersoll swore only to the events at Sarah Wilds’s April 22 examination, remarking in addition simply that they had “often” heard Mary, Ann Jr., Mercy Lewis, and Abigail Williams say “that one gooddy wilds of Topsfield did tortor them.” Clearly, whatever notes the adults had made during the girls’ fits did not support dating accusations of Wilds before April 19, and the adults, while still allied with the accusers, wanted to avoid taking a false oath. Mary (but not, apparently, Ann Jr.) testified at Goody Wilds’s trial, perhaps because Thomas Newton feared that the younger girl had lied. Walcott’s testimony might have seemed more plausible because she indicated that she had not initially been able to identify the specter she saw early in April as that of Goody Wilds.
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The sole surviving indictment of Sarah Wilds, for bewitching Mercy Lewis on, before, and after April 22, added “and Sundery orther Acts of Witchcraft” to embrace all the instances of maleficium recounted by Wilds’s neighbors. As was indicated in chapter 4, suspicions of Wilds evidently dated from allegations spread nearly two decades earlier by Mary Reddington, the sister of John Wilds’s first wife. John Hale, whom Goody Reddington consulted at the time, told the court that her story made him wonder whether Sarah had bewitched one of her stepsons. John Wilds recalled that he had confronted Mary’s husband years earlier “& told him I would arest him for his wifes defaming of my wife but the said Reddinton desired me not to doe it for it would but waste his Estate & that his wife would [be] done with it in tyme.” So John Wilds had not filed suit against his brother-in-law, and tales had continued to circulate about his second wife Sarah ever since, primarily involving bewitched loads of hay and dead cattle. The jury, finding the combination of spectral and malefic evidence convincing, rendered a guilty verdict.
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The trial of Goody Wilds was the last held during the court’s second session, but the grand jury heard several additional cases. On June 30, it took testimony from witnesses against Elizabeth and John Proctor, then on July 1 it considered evidence against Martha Carrier and the next day heard from witnesses against Dorcas Hoar. It issued two indictments against Goody Proctor and two against her husband. On July 1 the jury indicted Carrier for two spectral attacks, and on July 2 it also issued two true bills against Hoar. Then the court adjourned until early August.
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The other justices probably returned to Boston immediately, but the three Salem magistrates had more work to do. On that same July 2, at Thomas Beadle’s inn, they conducted two examinations, questioning Mistress Mary Bradbury and Ann Pudeator. The seventy-seven-year-old Mistress Bradbury, originally accused on May 26, was not arrested until June 29, presumably because her husband Thomas was one of the most prominent residents of Salisbury and an Essex County militia captain. The record of her examination has not survived, but during it Walcott, Putnam Jr., Hubbard, Vibber, and Warren all suffered the usual torments. Ann may have instigated this accusation, or at least been particularly fervent in pursuing it. Salisbury was her mother’s birthplace, and she later claimed to have seen a vision of her uncle, John Carr, “in a winding sheet,” informing her “that mis Bradbery had murthered him and that his blood did Crie for venjance against her.”
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The magistrates began their second interrogation of Ann Pudeator by confronting her with Sarah Churchwell’s claim in her June 1 confession that Pudeator had brought her the devil’s book. After Pudeator denied ever having seen Churchwell before, the magistrates moved on to another accuser, Lieutenant Jeremiah Neal, who charged Pudeator with having killed his wife after “often” threatening her. The afflicted had fits, with Warren being cured when Pudeator took her wrist. Walcott insisted she had seen the examinee in the spectral company of the recently convicted Goody Nurse. Pudeator was then returned to jail, and Mistress Bradbury joined her.
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The Salem magistrates also had to deal with a new complaint. On Friday, July 1, Thomas Putnam and his cousin John Jr. filed formal charges against Mistress Margaret Hawkes of Salem Town (formerly of Barbados) and her slave Candy for afflicting Walcott, Warren, and Putnam Jr. The record of Mistress Hawkes’s interrogation on July 4 is no longer extant, but Candy’s revealed that she, like other maidservants, accused her mistress of making her a witch. Asked how she effected her tortures, Candy showed the examiners two poppets, at the sight of which Warren and Deliverance and Abigail Hobbs were “greatly affrighted and fell into violent fits.” All of them, Hathorne noted, “said that the black man and Mrs. Hawkes and the negro stood by the poppets or rags and pinched them, and then they were afflicted.” The magistrates, accompanied by Nicholas Noyes, conducted several experiments on Candy’s poppets. When part of one was burned, the afflicted complained of being burned; when the other poppet was put into water, two of the sufferers “almost choaked” and a third ran toward the river, apparently trying to drown herself. The evidence of witchcraft must have seemed clear to all who beheld the phenomena.
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That the brief surge of skepticism a few weeks earlier had dissipated in the wake of the court’s second session is confirmed by a July 11 letter from Jacob Melijn, a Dutch merchant resident in Boston, to a friend in New York. “Throughout the countryside,” Melijn wrote, “the excessive gullibility of the magistrates has caused that which the tormented or possessed people bring in against someone together with other trivial circumstances to be taken as substantially true and convincing testimony against the accused.” Skeptical about the young accusers (but not about Satan’s wiles), Melijn “fear[ed] too much is believed,” warning of a conspiracy by “the devils and their devilish artificers, whose work it is whenever possible to seduce god’s elect.” Deeming the crisis “another punishment of God” visited upon New England, he described the afflicted as possibly “possessed by the Devil” (and thus potentially Satan’s agents rather than people tormented by him). He told his correspondent that he had asked “Mr. Mather” (probably Increase) “for something interesting and worth reading” on the subject, but had not received anything yet. Thus he sought from his friend “a pamphlet that points out and refutes in a godly way these superstitions and mistakes.” Melijn spelled out his own opinion: “it goes against the Rule of God’s word, that a person can broker a contract with the Devil, the hellish enemy as it is called, and extend his chains so that they bring about at will the deaths of other innocent people, old and young, babies and the unborn, and overthrow the whole rule of God’s divine providence.”
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