The Penguin History of Britain: New Worlds, Lost Worlds:The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1630 (52 page)

The persecution of a witch in its midst usually had the sanction of the whole village. At a time when economic change brought a growing estrangement between the social orders within a community, and as rural poverty increased, the old woman in search of alms was transformed from a worthy recipient of charity to a threat to the stability of the village. This was a period of some confusion and moral ambivalence in the treatment of poverty. The duty of charity to the deserving poor was urgently invoked as their plight became more apparent, but the growing estate of the landless and derelict was regarded with alarm. The old institutions of the Church and manor were failing, while the new institution of the poor law was not yet established. As charity came to be demanded, it might be less freely bestowed; as poor relief was ordered, it might be less readily handed out. The clash between resentment and duty brought an ambivalence which led richer neighbours to turn away beggars and then to feel guilt about their lack of charity. In Ireland, where social conditions were quite different, there was no witch-hunt.

The social context of the witch craze was the divided village; its intellectual and emotional origin was the intense belief in the immanence and power of the Devil. Villagers became convinced that living among them, in altogether familiar surroundings, there was someone in touch with perverted spiritual presences from the lower world. Witchcraft was just one part of the eternal, cosmic struggle between God and Satan, between good and evil, between salvation and damnation. Alongside the popular preoccupation with the witch’s power to do harm by occult means was the theologians’ belief that witchcraft involved a pact with the Devil. William Perkins, Elizabethan England’s pre-eminent divine, urged the execution of all witches; not because of the harm they caused, but because they depended upon Satan as their god. Although the diabolical covenant was not mentioned in the statutes of 1542 and 1563, and English witches were generally accused of maleficence rather than the heresy of a demonic pact, some of those accused of witchcraft declared a terrible allegiance. In 1566 Elizabeth Francis confessed that every time her cat (ominously called Satan) performed some sinister service for her, she rewarded him with a drop of her blood. Mother Samuel, one of the three witches of Warboys in Huntingdonshire tried
in 1593, confessed that she had forsaken her Maker and given her soul to the Devil. Even where the alleged witch had explicitly invoked the name of Jesus, as Elizabeth Lewys of Waltham in Essex did in 1563, saying, ‘Christ, Christ, my Christ, if thou be a saviour come down and avenge me of my enemies’, she was still accused; for it was not God but Satan who executed curses.

The Devil, the Prince of Darkness, was believed to have lost none of his ancient wisdom, none of the pride which had brought war in heaven, none of his power to tempt people to sin and despair. Once one of God’s angels, Satan knew all the secrets of the natural world and the hearts of men. He could counterfeit human or animal shape and appear at will. God allowed Satan to operate as agent of His justice. ‘Prince and god of this world,’ so John Knox acknowledged him, Satan was also lord of hell, presiding eternally over the torments of the damned. Satan’s powers were undiminished, yet the sinful Christian was left with fewer tangible aids to combat him. The incantations, charms and blessings of salt, water and wax which the Catholic Church had given to the laity to banish the Devil and his demons were outlawed by the Protestant Church. The ceremonies and prayers in the liturgy to exorcize the Devil, anointing and making the sign of the cross to ward off evil, were shunned as idolatry and superstition. In their place, the Christian was left with faith, the scriptures, repentance, fasting and prayer: a powerful armament certainly, but the battle was a lonely one. Penance was now not a sacrament but an individual wrestling with conscience. The Devil became more threatening than ever, even to the strongest mind.

One of the devils on stage at the Belsavage playhouse in 1588–9 was not an actor. That imagined demon appeared during a performance of Christopher Marlowe’s
Tragical History of Doctor Faustus
, a play upon a dangerous subject. The audience discovered Doctor Faustus, a Renaissance scholar, in his study at Wittenberg, ranging discontentedly among his books, dismissing each of his studies in turn: logic, physic, law, ‘Divinity, adieu!’ ‘’Tis magic, magic that hath ravished’ Faustus. He declared that:

‘That famous art’ of the magician would give Faustus power ‘on earth as Jove is in the sky’, so the Evil Angel promised him. But the magician’s art was a ‘damned art’; damned, so William Perkins preached, because the magician aspired ‘to search out such things as God would have kept secret’. It was for eating from the forbidden Tree of Knowledge that Adam lost Paradise. Curiosity, man’s first disobedience, brought the Fall and would bring the fall of Faustus.

Faustus was a Renaissance magus, a magician. Renaissance magicians aspired to regain the understanding of nature and the divine revelation once granted to Adam. They believed that Adam’s knowledge had been transmitted through a succession of
prisci theologi
, pre-Christian yet divinely inspired teachers of ancient wisdom: from Moses to the legendary Hermes Trismegistus, who represented Egyptian wisdom, to Zoroaster, representing Chaldean wisdom, to Plato, Orpheus and Pythagoras. From Hermetic writings Renaissance thinkers learnt that through mystical regeneration man’s dominion over nature, lost at the Fall, could be recovered; that man might manipulate and compel nature for sublime purposes. The aim was to reach God Himself through contemplation of nature and of the sympathies uniting the universe; the great series of analogies and correspondences operating through all creation. The final aspiration was to rise from the mutable, physical world to the divine, super-celestial sphere, there to commune with God and learn the hidden laws of the universe. A way to unlock cosmic powers was by the magic of the cabbala, the permutation of the sacred Hebrew alphabet.

This magical, occult, cabbalistic knowledge was given to very, very few. In England, Dr John Dee, Elizabeth’s celestial mathematician, was unique in his fantastic, polymathic learning, and in the intensity of his speculations, but he and his philosophy had influence in the highest political and intellectual circles, and his library was an academy for the most questing intellects. On his deathbed, Sir Philip Sidney, who knew both Dee and Giordano Bruno, the Italian cosmographer, philosopher and spy, had asked what was the opinion of the
prisci theologi
regarding the immortality of the soul. Dee, in a spirit of intense piety, was known to have used ceremonial magic to communicate with angels in order to come closer to the divine. The first conference between Dee and Archangel Uriel was recorded in 1581:

Sir Humphrey Gilbert, the colonizer, was taught the science of navigation by Dee. He, too, communicated with spirits in another world, through the medium of a scryer (seer). Adam told him: ‘Go clean in apparel; and be good to the poor; and leave swearing… then nothing shalt thou lack.’ Such magical manipulation could be used for good or evil, but was condemned as necromancy. Supernatural power could emanate only from two sources, from God or Satan, and secret knowledge was soon construed as diabolic practice. The audience watching
Doctor Faustus
were uneasily aware of the dangers of his arcane enquiries and drawn into his conjurings.

Faustus, seeking to be ‘great emperor of the world’ through his occult power, drew the magician’s circle around him and dared to conjure a spirit from hell. Enter Mephistopheles: not because Faustus has summoned him, but because devils appear to those who blasphemously ‘pray devoutly to the prince of hell’. ‘So Faustus hath’, for ‘this word “damnation” terrifies not him’: or not yet. Faustus, who had already ‘incurred eternal death/By desp’rate thoughts against Jove’s deity’, offered Lucifer his soul in return for twenty-four years of living ‘in all voluptuousness’ and for command of Mephistopheles’ service:

Still Faustus might have abjured magic but, despairing of God’s love, he turned to magical dominion as a perverted substitute. Swearing a solemn covenant bequeathing his soul to Lucifer, he signed it with his blood. ‘
Consummatum est
[It is finished],’ he declared, in blasphemous imitation of Christ’s last words upon the Cross. But for Faustus this was not the end, only the beginning.

Faustus’s first question to Mephistopheles, once the pact was made, was one which haunted him and his audience. ‘Tell me, where is the place that men call hell?’

Came Mephistopheles’ chilling reply: ‘Where we are is hell/And where hell is must we ever be.’

Faustus never heeded Mephistopheles’ first warning of the anguish of separation from God and could not believe it now: ‘Come, I think hell’s a fable.’

‘Ay, think so still, till experience change thy mind.’

Experience would, for Faustus learned through twenty-four years’
‘journey through the world and air’ that led everywhere and nowhere except back to Wittenberg, that hell is both a real place and in the mind. For a time ‘sweet pleasure’ conquered ‘deep despair’ as he heard blind Homer sing, disported with ‘fairest courtesans’ and saw a vision of Helen of Troy, heralded in surpassing poetry:

But that delusive Helen was a demon, who exchanged a kiss for his soul; the ultimate demonic pact.

Faustus had pledged his soul in order to learn the forbidden secrets of the universe. Mounted upon ‘Olympus’ top’, ‘seated in a chariot burning bright’ drawn by dragons, he had ‘gone to prove cosmography’. Faustus and the audience before whom his tragedy was played lived during a period of astronomical revolution. The old certainties of the geocentric Ptolemaic universe had been broken by the discoveries and theories of Copernicus and Bruno. The revelation that the cosmos was infinite, that the sun was at the centre and that the earth revolved around it, that there were unseen stars with an incalculable influence, and that there were worlds beyond worlds beyond this one was profoundly shocking: too mysterious, thought John Dee, for lesser minds to know. Giordano Bruno’s lectures on Copernican cosmology at Oxford in 1583 had been halted, though whether because of his exposition of a revolutionary system in a die-hard university or whether because of his extensive plagiarism was hard to tell.

It was chastening to discover that the earth was a planet like any other, subject to the same laws of motion; alarming to see the heavens lose their perfection as they were observed to be subject to corruption and change. How was it possible for a ‘new’ star to appear, as people believed one did in 1577? From the leads of Ralegh’s Durham House in London, Thomas Harriot turned his telescope – the first in England – on the skies and, like Galileo, found blemishes on celestial bodies: spots on the sun, craters on the moon. Such astronomical discoveries undermined the fundamental distinction between things sublunar and things celestial, and even the subordination of the earth to heavenly bodies. So Faustus’s questions to Mephistopheles about the nature of the cosmos took the audience where the most sceptical and questioning minds of the time were at debate; to the dangerous limits of legitimate
and forbidden knowledge; to the baffling confrontation between the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems.

‘Tell me,’ asked Faustus, ‘are there many heavens above the moon?’ The questions Faustus asked did not directly concern the contested doctrine of heliocentricity, but they touched upon a central inadequacy of the Ptolemaic system; its failure to account for the unequal motion of the planets. Mephistopheles, who was bound to tell Faustus anything he asked, told him nothing he did not know already. ‘But tell me,’ Faustus asked impatiently, ‘hath every sphere a dominion?… Tell me who made the world… Sweet Mephistopheles, tell me.’

Mephistopheles refused: ‘Move me not, for I will not tell thee’; to do so would be ‘against our kingdom’.

Faustus, the divinity scholar, had asked a blasphemous question, for every schoolboy knew that God made heaven and earth in six days;
ex nihilo
, from nothing. Yet some had begun to challenge even that. ‘Well, I am answered,’ said Faustus, understanding that his quest for forbidden knowledge was futile and that he had sold his soul for nothing. How many in the audience wondered, with Faustus, whether the orthodox cosmology of the age was a deception and shared his resentment that the truth was hidden? And if doubts about the physical universe disquieted them, the play raised questions about the moral universe more disturbing still.