The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England (22 page)

Among the early objects of the benevolence of the Earl and Countess was an old woman known as Mother (Joan) Flower, and one of her daughters, Margaret. Mother Flower’s poverty was relieved and she was employed as ‘Char-woman’ (the word, then as now, was applied to a domestic help who came in by the day) at the castle. Margaret Flower was put in charge of the ‘poultry abroad and the wash-house indoors’. It cannot be said that the Flowers, mother and daughter, sound very satisfactory employees. Margaret Flower purloined provisions, and while some servants’ perks were obviously tolerated, these provisions were taken out of the castle in excessive quantities. Margaret Flower also crept out of the castle, ‘returning at such unreasonable hours’ that mischief was suspected. This mischief was no doubt connected with the fact that Mother Flower’s house was supposed to be a local bawdy-house; at any rate it was always full of ‘idle and debauched company’. Here Mother Flower’s other
daughter, Philippa, held sway, and among other activities was ‘lewdly transported with the love of one Thomas Simpson’.

As for Mother Flower, she would be described a few years later as ‘a monstrous malicious woman, full of oaths, curses, and imprecations, irreligious, and for anything they [her neighbours] saw by her, a plain atheist’. The general impression left by Mother Flower was certainly gruesome: ‘her very countenance was estranged, her eyes were fierce and hollow, her speech fell and envious, her demeanour strange and exotic, and her conversation sequestered’. In short, both in her appearance and in her speech, Mother Flower corresponded closely to Reginald Scot’s stereotype of the breed of witch: ‘commonly old, lame, bleare-eyed, pale, foul and full of wrinkles … lean and deformed, showing melancholy in their faces … doting, scolds, mad, divelish’.
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Furthermore Mother Flower had a pet cat called Rutterkin, and in that respect too she conformed to the stereotype of the witch. ‘I come, Graymalkin … Paddock calls …’, cry the witches to their familiars in the opening scene of
Macbeth
before they vanish. It is her dog Tomalin
–
‘My Tommy, My sweet Tom-boy!’ – actually the devil in disguise, who lures the Witch of Edmonton to her destruction. The ‘brindled cat’ which mewed thrice, the toad of
Macbeth
, the devilish dog of Edmonton, find a hundred parallels in the witch trials of the seventeenth century, which also featured a multitude of rats, and even the occasional wasp or butterfly. During the famous case of the North Moreton witches, for example, tried at Abingdon in 1605, Agnes Pepperwell was accused of having a ‘Whitish mouse with a man’s face called Sweat’ who was a Spirit, Elizabeth Gregory had a black rat with a swine’s face and a boar’s tusk called Catche, and Mary Pepperwell had ‘a whitish toad’ called Vizett.
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Who knew what devilish familiar might lurk inside the humble shape of a black dog seen by the roadside or a tame white mouse on an old woman’s shoulder? No domestic animal, glimpsed prowling in the shades of evening, slinking through the night, was to be totally trusted, never mind the fact that such a pet might be the natural companion
–
solace even
–
of a lonely old
woman, never mind the nocturnal habits of so many such creatures, notably cats, for this was an area where common sense had taken flight before the onslaughts of fear and prejudice. So Mother Flower’s pet cat Rutterkin was destined to play his part in the accusations against her.

What with Margaret Flower’s light-fingeredness and her ‘indecencies’, and the maledictions of her mother, it was hardly surprising that the Flower family in general made themselves extremely unpopular with the household at Belvoir Castle; very soon ‘nobody but the Earl’s family loved them’. And then that love too faded: the Earl of Rutland turned against Mother Flower ‘and used not that Freedom nor familiar conferences with her as usual’. When a certain Peake wronged Mother Flower, the Earl of Rutland, hitherto her patron, paid no attention to the injustice, which was thus not remedied.

As for the Countess, she too became disillusioned with Margaret Flower for her neglect of her duties, so that to the pleased derision of the neighbours, Margaret Flower found herself ejected from her comfortable billet at the castle. The Countess of Rutland seems to have behaved with financial generosity over the dismissal, giving Margaret Flower 40s (as much if not more than a year’s pay), a bolster, and a mattress of wool. Nevertheless the feelings of Mother Flower and her family towards the Earl and Countess of Rutland now turned to ‘Hate and Malice’.
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For all this, when in 1613 the heir to Belvoir, Henry Lord Roos, sickened and died of a disease for which the doctors could find neither cure nor explanation, witchcraft was not suspected. It was only when the second boy Francis, now succeeded to his brother’s courtesy title of Lord Roos, sickened, and the girl Catherine Manners also went into some form of decline, that doctors and desperate family alike, interested neighbours and dependants, looked round for some explanation outside the natural world as to why this tragedy should be threatening the house of Rutland.

By an unfortunate coincidence
–
from the point of view of the Flower family
–
there was at this juncture a witch trial in progress
at the nearby Leicestershire Assizes, at which three women who knew the Flowers, Anne Baker, Joan Willimot and Ellen Green, were being accused. Familiars played their part in this drama. Anne Baker revealed that Joan Willimot had given her two spirits in the likeness of a kitten, which went with deceptive innocence under the name of ‘Puss’, and a mole called ‘Hiffe’. Both animals had leapt on her shoulder and immediately sucked at her ears (sucking was an acknowledged attribute of familiars). Anne Baker bestowed the kitten upon a baker who had struck her and the mole on one Anne Dawse who had termed her ‘witch, whore, jade’. Within a fortnight both the baker and Anne Dawse were dead.
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Intensive examination of the three women also produced a number of weird accusations against Mother Flower concerning the vengeance she had vowed to take on the Earl of Rutland. Later the Flower daughters provided further details of the affair. Possibly in their case some form of physical torture was used,
²³
but generally speaking where suspected witches were concerned, relentless questioning by the authorities, combined with the other harsh deprivations associated with imprisonment, produced confessions readily enough. Mother Flower was by this time, as we shall see, beyond human aid or punishment, but the story of her vengeance, as pieced together from the various confessions, went as follows.
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After Margaret Flower’s dismissal the devil had seen an excellent opportunity to use the family as ‘Instruments to enlarge his kingdom’. He therefore offered them whatever they might want, accommodatingly suggesting that he should attend them in the guise of a dog or cat or rat, in order to allay suspicion. ‘Abominable kisses’ and ‘an odious sacrifice of blood’ sealed this unpleasant compact. Although the Flowers did take the opportunity thereafter to produce the occasional ‘Tempest’ for the ruin of the crops, it was of course personal vengeance against the Earl of Rutland which chiefly preoccupied them.

Joan Willimot, herself a widow, like Mother Flower, testified to the latter’s boast that though she could not have her will of the Earl of Rutland ‘she had spied my lord’s son and stricken him to
the earth with a white spirit’. Spitting on some earth and working it with her fingers, she announced herself well satisfied that ‘though she could not hurt the Lord himself, yet she had sped his son’. Margaret Flower supplied further details as to how her mother had carried all this out. Mother Flower had asked her daughter to procure a glove belonging to the young Lord Roos, and Margaret had duly picked one up which she found lying ‘on the Rushes in the Nursery’. Mother Flower then first used the glove to stroke her cat Rutterkin, then dipped the glove in hot water, ‘pricked it often’ and within a week, lo and behold Henry Lord Roos was ‘tormented’.

The glove of Francis Lord Roos was discovered by Margaret Flower on a dung-hill; she brought it to her mother where it received similar treatment of immersion in hot water and rubbing on the belly of Rutterkin. However in the case of Francis, because the boy, although sickly, was still alive in 1619, it was stated that Mother Flower had merely threatened him ‘a Mischief’ and had predicted (inaccurately as it turned out) that he would mend again.

A piece of handkerchief belonging to Lady Catherine Manners was similarly applied to the belly of Rutterkin, at which point the cat was ordered to ‘fly and go’. According to Margaret Flower, Rutterkin merely replied with the word ‘Mew’ and did not either fly or go; however, this refusal was somehow interpreted as evidence that even her familiar did not have power over a witch like Mother Flower. The lewd Philippa Flower confirmed her sister’s confession concerning the glove and its treatment; ultimately her mother had buried it ‘Wishing the owner might never thrive’. Philippa also contributed that her mother frequently cursed both the Earl and Countess of Rutland, boiling ‘feathers and blood together, using devilish speeches and strange gestures’.

We do not have to accept the wilder statements of Margaret and Philippa Flower in order to suppose that Mother Flower had not only threatened to be revenged on the Earl of Rutland, but had actually indulged in some form of witchcraft to do so. Nor was her successful form of vengeance intended to be kept secret. Anne Baker had been told three years earlier by ‘two wives of
Belvoir’ concerning the death of Lord Roos that a glove had been buried and as it ‘rotted and wasted, so did the liver of the lord’. Writing towards the end of the eighteenth century, when descendants of the deponents were still living, John Nichols in his
History and Antiquities of the County of Leicester
wrote that there was ‘no doubt of their intentional guilt … In short they believed themselves to be witches.’
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For a malevolent old woman, ranged as she saw it against the powerful Rutland family interest, witchcraft represented not so much one possible form of revenge as the only possible form. The coincidental (as we must believe) sickenings and deaths of the Manners children represented therefore at once Mother Flower’s triumph and her downfall.

After the Leicestershire accusations against the Flowers had been heard, the family were fetched by the Justices of the Peace, who bound them over to appear at the Assizes at Lincoln. Margaret and Philippa reached Lincoln, but Mother Flower died suddenly
en route
and was buried at Ancaster. Even the manner of her death was appropriate to one whose ‘whole course of life gave grave suspicion that she was a notorious witch’. It was remembered that Mother Flower had predicted that she would be ‘neither hanged nor burnt’. This time her prediction was certainly successful although there is no evidence that she had additionally foreseen the precise manner of her death. This came about as Mother Flower was eating a piece of bread and butter. She called on the morsel to choke her if she was guilty of being a witch. She was and it did.
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The Flower sisters were less fortunate. A series of Tudor statutes against witchcraft had culminated in the toughest one of all at the beginning of the new reign. By the Act of 1604 it was no longer necessary to have actually caused the death of a person by the use of witchcraft, the mere practice of it if proved was sufficient to ensure guilt. This law, which was not repealed until 1736, also made any form of consultation with or feeding of an evil spirit a felony; so much for Rutterkin and his kind, the kitten called Puss, the mole called Hiffe and so forth and so on, an endless stream of evil spirits masquerading as domestic animals
who were undeniably being harboured by their mistresses. By this standard, Philippa Flower too, like her mother, was probably guilty of practising witchcraft
–
in her case to cause Thomas Simpson to love her; Margaret by her own account had supplied the fatal gloves belonging to Lord Rutland’s sons.

Margaret’s confessions in general sounded that pathetic note of hysterical delusion which marks so much of the evidence at the witch trials.
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She admitted that she had two familiar spirits ‘sucking on her’, one white, the other black and spotted. The white spirit sucked under her left breast, and its black-spotted fellow ‘within inward parts of her secrets’; they had agreed to carry out all her wishes in return for the promise of her soul. While Margaret was in gaol at Lincoln, four other devils also appeared to her, one of whom had a black head like an ape; unfortunately Margaret could not recall anything about their encounter except that she had been angry that the devil had not been ‘plainer’ in the manner of his speaking. The other three took the forms of Rutterkin, ‘little Robin’ and another spirit.

Philippa Flower too bore witness to the existence of a white rat sucking at her own left breast – in fact a spirit – for three or four years, to which she had promised her soul if it would cause Thomas Simpson to love her. And Philippa confirmed that Rutterkin, now recognized for what he was, a devil in disguise, had persistently bitten and sucked at her sister’s neck over the years.

In March 1619 the two daughters of Mother Flower were executed at Lincoln ‘to the terror of all beholders’. The Earl of Rutland, hearing them cry out against the devil ‘for deluding them’ and now breaking his promise of assistance ‘When they stood most in need of his Help’, no longer felt any difficulty in believing in their ‘Wickedness and horrible Contracts’.
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A year later when their sickly son Francis died in his turn, the Earl and Countess, now left without male heirs, must have felt themselves still further convinced that justice had been done.