Read Solomon's Secret Arts Online
Authors: Paul Kléber Monod
Some educated men eagerly sought conversation with fairies; others saw them as demons.
The Athenian Mercury
opined that they were “Devils assuming such little
Airy Bodies
,” adding that “they were never found, but where people were superstitious and credulous.”
118
Alexander Pope, in his celebrated poem
The Rape of the Lock
, gently mocked the fairy folk. Pope claimed that the poem's “
Machinery
” was based on “the
Rosicrucian
Doctrine of Spirits,” which he had derived from the Abbé de Montfaucon de Villars's
Count of Gabalis
.
119
As that work was a satire, Pope was clearly snickering at those who took Rosicrucians and fairies seriously. In keeping with their silliness, Pope's fairies are feminized and “[t]o Maids alone and Children are reveal'd.” They represent the negative characteristics associated with elite women: vanity, anger, weakness, prudery, coquettishness. Pope's fairies guard “the purity of melting Maids” and are obsessed with hierarchy:
For Sylphs, yet mindful of their ancient Race,
Are, as when Women, wondrous fond of Place.
Yet they cannot protect the fair Belinda from the assault on her hair made by the amorous baron.
120
The only recourse these ineffectual spirits have is to raise Belinda's spleen to a fit of anger. Pope's fairies represent feminine vices rather than native or “savage” peoples and, while charming, they are also ridiculous. In an age of real wars and revolutions (including that of 1688, which was often compared to a rape), the little, bickering world of spirits, like that of women, was considered petty and inconsequential by the literary elite.
The Devil Survives
Not everybody laughed at the power of spirits, or made light of their influence. The fear of demons, and of their role in enticing witches, continued to have a wide social compass. Whether or not the impact of witchcraft was shrinking in the decades after the Glorious Revolution is difficult to determine. English witch trials had declined to virtually nothing by 1700, but this had happened before for periods in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, so it was not necessarily an indication that the witch craze was over, let alone a sign that popular witch beliefs were disappearing.
121
In Scotland, the execution of witches continued, with the encouragement of local ministers and presbyteries. The southwestern counties of Dumfries and Galloway saw a spate of accusations between 1690 and 1710. A particularly gruesome case at Paisley in 1697 ended with six witches being strangled and burned; a seventh committed suicide.
122
The fishing village of Pittenweem in Fife became obsessed by witches in 1704, after a blacksmith's apprentice thought he had been bewitched. Accused witches were tortured in the local tollbooth; one of them starved to death in a cell. A woman who escaped was recaptured by an angry mob and taken to the town beach, where she was crushed to death under a door laden with boulders.
123
This incident hardly betokened a lessening of popular fear of witches in Scotland. Meanwhile, Scottish writers railed against the diabolism of all forms of magic. Some, like John Bell, Presbyterian minister of Gladsmuir, chose to stress the covenant witches made with the Devil.
124
In England, despite the decline in prosecutions, fear of witches persisted. A peculiar feature of the period was the appearance of false, but entirely plausible, reports of witch trials. These included a description of two women being convicted at Northampton, then hanged almost to death and burned, a Scottish practice that was not used as a punishment for English witches. The purpose of these fabrications can only have been to encourage English readers to believe in witches, and to treat them as their Scots brethren did.
125
Scepticism about the power of the Devil may have been gaining ground among some educated minds in England, as was indicated in 1695 by the publication of a translation of Balthasar Bekker's
Die Betooverde Wereld
(
The World Bewitched
). This voluminous study by a Dutch Calvinist clergyman used biblical exegesis to demonstrate that magic was a pagan or popish invention, and that the Devil had no real influence over humanity.
126
In 1705, however, the physician John Beaumont launched a counterblast to such arguments, which he associated with “Young Wits, who are well opinioned of their Parts.” Beaumont published his own massive and highly learned treatise on diabolical spirits, or “Genii” as he called them.
127
He was no theologian; in fact, he was a geologist, who had contributed articles on fossils and minerals to the
Philosophical Transactions
. He dedicated his book on witches to a former president of the Royal Society, Lord Carbery. While he accepted that the existence of spirits was conducive to belief in God, Beaumont did not depend on pious exhortations or questionable narratives to prove his point. His approach was very different from that of Joseph Glanvill.
In response to Bekker, Beaumont compiled an enormous number of instances from classical literature, early Christian writers, European folklore, recent history and his own personal experiences, to show that spirits had been perceived by sight, hearing and the other senses. Such an approach was fully
consistent with the empirical philosophy propounded by John Locke. Beaumont's carefully chosen examples were presented with plenty of analytical comment. They led him towards what he believed to be a rational and irrefutable conclusion:
If there are Effects that cannot be produc'd by Bodies, there must necessarily be in the World other Beings than Bodies; and if among these prodigious Effects, there are some that do not carry men to God, and make them fall into Error and Illusion, it's a farther invincible Argument that we must acknowledge other Beings than the Being absolutely perfect and Bodies … we must admit created Spirits capable of amusing Men, and seducing them by Deceits.
128
The conjunction of natural causes with moral effects may jar with a modern reader's sensibilities, but it was hardly an unusual mixture for the period. The annual lectures on science and religion that were set up at London in the 1690s through the will of the late Robert Boyle often conveyed exactly the same point: namely, that the natural universe had an overriding moral purpose.
129
Beaumont, however, saw no place at all for benevolent spirits. The Genii he described were always malign. For him, magic was the domain of demons, and those who thought otherwise were simply deluded.
130
Beaumont's views were not shared by that arbiter of politeness,
The Spectator
. In a July 1711 essay, Joseph Addison adopted what he presented as a “Neuter” position on the subject of witchcraft—except that neutrality, as Addison was well aware, was not really possible:
When I hear the Relations that are made from all Parts of the World … I cannot forbear thinking that there is such an Intercourse and Commerce with Evil Spirits, as that which we express by the Name of Witchcraft. But when I consider that the ignorant and credulous Parts of the World abound most in these Relations, and that the Persons among us who are supposed to engage in such an Infernal Commerce are People of a weak Understanding and crazed Imagination, and at the same time reflect upon the many Impostures and Delusions of this Nature that have been detected in all Ages, I endeavour to suspend my Belief till I hear more certain Accounts than any which have yet come to my Knowledge … I believe in general that there is, and has been such a thing as Witchcraft; but at the same time can give no Credit to any Particular Instance of it.
131
Addison's “neutrality” was clearly no endorsement of Beaumont's work, or of the three recent editions of
Saducismus Triumphatus
. He ignored their assertion
that the existence of witchcraft disproved materialism and atheism, although shortly after the
Spectator
article, Daniel Defoe would forcefully restate that opinion in his weekly
Review
.
132
Ultimately, according to
The Spectator
, the polite gentleman would be moved by reason and sentiment, rather than religious belief or scepticism, to reject the possibility of witchcraft. The imaginary reader of the
Spectator
essays, of course, was a moderate latitudinarian in religion, not a Dissenter like Defoe. Addison drove the case against witchcraft home, not by religious appeals, but by creating a fictional character, an old woman named Moll White who lived in a hovel, kept a cat and had often been reported to the local magistrates as a witch. “I hear there is scarce a Village in
England
that has not a
Moll White
in it,” Addison observed. “When an old Woman begins to doat, and grow chargeable to a Parish, she is generally turned into a Witch … This frequently cuts off Charity from the greatest Objects of Compassion.” The old woman's pathetic physical and mental condition accounted for the charges made against her, and might even explain her confessing to witchcraft, from being “frighted at her self.”
133
Within a year of Addison's
Spectator
article, the argument over witchcraft had turned ferocious, due to the politically motivated debate over the case of Jane Wenham. She was an elderly, indigent woman living in the tiny village of Walkern in Hertfordshire. Insulted by a local farmer who suspected her of killing cattle and horses by witchcraft, she complained to a local justice of the peace and noted antiquarian, Sir Henry Chauncy, who allowed her to choose an arbitrator to settle the affair. Wenham selected the parish minister, Godfrey Gardiner, who ordered the farmer to pay her a shilling for defaming her character. Wenham unwisely refused this solution, however, and Gardiner subsequently became convinced that his teenage servant, Anne Thorne, who was behaving strangely, had been bewitched by the angry woman. After she confessed, a charge of witchcraft was brought against Wenham at the county assizes in March 1712. She was found guilty, but the judge, Sir John Powell, immediately reprieved her. Powell had merrily poked fun at the accusations in court—when told that Wenham was seen flying, he responded that there was no law against it.
134
The case was rooted in local antagonisms, no doubt worsened by the economic depression that accompanied the War of the Spanish Succession. Twice-married and childless, Jane Wenham was aggressive, impoverished and fitted perfectly the stereotype of the infertile, “malevolent mother” that so frightened the defenders of religion.
135
The situation became serious because it involved local dignitaries, including Chauncy's grandson Francis Bragge junior, who witnessed Anne Thorne's fits. Bragge, a Cambridge graduate who had read
Saducismus Triumphatus
carefully, saw the case as delivering a blow against atheism.
The Wenham affair might never have come to public attention if it had not been for Bragge, who wrote an account of the trial proceedings in order to refute “several Gentlemen who would not believe that there are any Witches since the time of our Saviour
Christ
, who came to destroy the Works of the Devil.”
136
Bragge's pamphlet, which went through four editions, was published by the notorious Edmund Curll, known for his promotion of various scurrilous, seditious and salacious works. Curll must have felt that Bragge was on to a winning theme, because he brought out a sequel soon after, adding further details and evidence from an unconnected Irish witch trial of the 1660s.
137
A challenger then appeared, in the form of a Whig newspaper,
The Protestant Post-Boy
. It replied to Bragge's account with a series of articles, partly plagiarized from John Wagstaffe's 1669 work,
The Question of Witchcraft Debated
. Collected in a pamphlet under the unequivocal title
The Impossibility of Witchcraft
, these articles concentrated heavily on the religious argument that God did not allow the Devil to carry out wicked deeds by supernatural means.
138
Predictably, the pamphlet was answered by Bragge in two further reiterations of the case against Jane Wenham, as well as by a writer using the initials “G.R.,” who rehearsed the scriptural basis of witchcraft.
139
The sceptical side was then taken up by “a Physician in
Hertfordshire
,” who condemned belief in witches as “Priestcraft,” rejected the exorcism of evil spirits as “
Popish
Supersitition” and denied that anybody since Jesus Christ had been able to cure demoniacs by prayer.
140
The only relatively impartial treatment of the subject came from the pen of an anonymous author, later identified as the Reverend Henry Stebbing of St Catharine's College, Cambridge, a Tory divine. As to the existence of witches, he was “very inclinable to believe, there are such Persons in the World,” but he rejected the evidence against Wenham as based on prejudice.
141
The Wenham trial received more attention from the press than any previous case of witchcraft. Its details, however, were not particularly compelling, and the level of notice given to it had more to do with partisan politics than with the debate over diabolic influence. Within Parliament, the Tories were triumphant in 1712, and party backbenchers were pushing hard to limit the activities of religious Dissenters. Jane Wenham herself was accused of attending Dissenting meetings. The Whigs fought back by denouncing “priestcraft” and accusing their opponents of wanting to restore the Stuart Pretender. Wenham's prosecution by an “Ignorant” parish minister who accepted the “
Popish
Superstition” of exorcism was therefore politically combustible stuff.
142
Publicity, however, worked in favour of the Whigs. A full-scale debate in the London press over a particular instance of
maleficium
or malevolent magic was bound to turn many readers against the idea of witchcraft. Accusations in witch cases were usually constructed out of small-scale, personal tensions that
looked petty or absurd when magnified by press coverage. Testimony about diabolic activity tended to be highly subjective, peppered with innuendo and seasoned with long-standing prejudices. None of this came off very well in the rhetorical world of printed discourse, which favoured an appearance of disinterest. In short, publicity tainted the Wenham case from the start, making it seem wrong-headed and even malevolent. Bragge's response was to provide more and more details, which proved a losing gambit. His antagonist John Roberts, printer of
The Protestant Post-Boy
and publisher of most of the anti-Bragge pamphlets, gleefully advertised works on both sides of the case, knowing that publicity was bound to strengthen his arguments, as well as to enrich him.