The Witches: Salem, 1692 (43 page)

Although neither man has attended a trial, S. assures B. that no suspect has wound up incarcerated solely on spectral evidence. B. begs to differ. S. consoles himself that the touch test and the evil eye never fail; B. quibbles with both practices.
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But what of the baptisms, the meetings, the sacraments? persists S. Again B. asks how a confessed witch might offer credible testimony. “Do you really believe that all the persons accused are witches?” he challenges. Because the scale of the attack seems implausible. S. agrees, leading B. to attempt to persuade him that the accusers either lie or suffer delusions. The two ultimately, fearfully agree to disagree. S. cannot resist a parting shot. “You are an admirable advocate for witches,” he informs B., who sighs. He has heard the charge before. It was the label that attached itself to anyone who dared question the court before October.

HOW OFTEN WILLARD
had been so labeled—and how often he had been pilloried for his views—became clear in another paper that began to circulate privately, probably among very few hands, on October 8.
From it we know more of what Willard could not express but was by that fall everywhere discussed. The paper’s author was thirty-four-year-old Thomas Brattle, an Anglican-leaning, Harvard-educated merchant, son of one of the richest men in Massachusetts. Brattle wrote to an unnamed minister who, midstorm, solicited his views. Thoughtfully Brattle provided them. He was uniquely well positioned to do so, as one of the best-read men in Massachusetts who neither preached nor held government office. On close terms with the court, he had no familial ties to the Phips administration. Like many of Boston’s ministers, he was a man of science. Unlike many of them, he had regularly observed Salem arraignments and trials. He had been on hand for Stoughton’s initial jury instructions, for Mary Bradbury’s September 9 turn as a blue boar, and for the August 19 hanging.

Nearly a generation younger than Sewall, the youngest of the witchcraft judges, Brattle sounded like the kind of man who had had to teach himself Euclidean geometry at Harvard, as indeed he was; the subject was beyond the ken of his tutors. He had taken precise measurements of a comet sighted in New England over a decade earlier. As critically, to Brattle a comet was just a comet. He had missed the commotion over the Goodwin children, having spent much of the 1680s in England, in part working with chemist Robert Boyle. Even before that trip, Brattle had chafed at New England provincialism. He tended to believe simple solutions the best ones, a novel idea in Boston; in many ways he seemed to have parachuted into 1692 from another century altogether. As much as he today makes his compatriots sound like an extinct species engaging in a medieval rite, he was no rabble-rouser. It was Brattle who prefaced his remarks with the caveat that he preferred to bite off his fingertips than cast aspersions on authority. He did not however believe men to be infallible. When they erred, it was essential to speak up. He dissociated himself from the fractious types stirring up Boston. He had no political agenda; he did not oppose the new charter. But sometimes silence was unconscionable. Covering himself as he waded ahead—he hoped he was
not walking into a snare by speaking his mind; Reverend Milborne had been arrested for far less—he undermined every assumption of Stoughton’s court. He also avoided signing his letter.

As Brattle saw it, the trials were remarkable for irregularities of all kinds. How could a worldly, longtime associate of John Alden’s—a captain of industry, Bartholomew Gedney had made and lost fortunes—turn on Alden because his touch appeared to relieve a poor child of her suffering? How could Reverend Noyes, “a learned, a charitable, and a good man,” trust in the evil eye? It was all claptrap, the kind of village nonsense practiced by “the ruder and more ignorant sort.” Who did not have an unusual mark somewhere on his body? Since when did a failure to cry indicate guilt? (Hathorne, Corwin, and Gedney were particularly fierce on that point.) The bulk of the charges moreover had nothing to do with witchcraft. Brattle balked at judicial procedures: The court was partial, its methods benighted, its hearings a travesty. Did the magistrates really claim they had never convicted on spectral evidence alone? That was patently untrue. And only a man out of his wits would accept it as legal evidence. Why was Justice Corwin’s mother-in-law—accused several times—still at large? The court allowed confessed witches, who had renounced God and Christ, to swear under oath; Brattle quibbled over the very term “confessors.” Testimony had been extracted by force, and from some of the most pious women in New England.

He went far beyond Willard, who could not bring himself to criticize the court. Brattle stressed the human cost: whole families had been torn apart. Those miserable Andover husbands who had believed the words of the village children over those of their own wives! They could now only “grieve and mourn bitterly.” Indeed, fifty-five had confessed to diabolical plots. But some had maintained their innocence for over eighteen hours, “after most violent, distracting, and dragooning methods had been used with them.” They thought themselves near death. He made clear how it was that “most would have chosen to have fallen into the hands of the barbarous enemy than”—as a later critic phrased it—“the hands of their brethren in church fellowship.”

Brattle did not inquire how this remarkable mishap had come about, more dismayed by where events were leading. He had a few ideas as to culprits, however. While he choked on court procedures, he reserved special scorn for the bewitched. Who had deemed them visionaries? For the record, if they named people they had never met, that information could only come from the devil. (The same went for the confessors, their accounts riddled with contradictions.) If truly they suffered, how—here he specifically contradicted Stoughton’s instructions to the jury that the intent to work witchcraft alone mattered—did they appear “hale and hearty, robust and lusty” day after day? As for spectral sight, the scientist in Brattle railed. It did not require an education in optics to grasp that it was “an utter impossibility” to see with one’s eyes shut. That was not vision. It was imagination. There was as much reason to imprison Elizabeth Knapp as to countenance Salem’s “blind, nonsensical girls.” They were just as likely to turn out to have been delusional. At worst they were possessed. He was not the only one who thought of Knapp, whose history hung heavily over the proceedings. Willard alone left her out of both his public pronouncements and his underground one, even while the possession thesis continued to clunk around. Others had raised the Knapp case with Stoughton. The chief justice spoke of her uncharitably, “as though,” reported Brattle, “he believed her to be a witch to this day.”

Like everyone else, he had the greatest of respect for Stoughton and for the chief justice’s wisdom and integrity. But as everyone who had observed him agreed, he was on this issue a brutal zealot, impatient with anything that challenged his opinions. Along with Stoughton, the Salem justices (or “the Salem gentlemen,” as Brattle had them) constituted the prime movers. Hathorne, Corwin, and Gedney—and, at their sides, Reverends Noyes, Parris, and Higginson—frowned on queries, even those posed by their closest friends. Criticism of any kind rankled, eliciting irate answers.

Brattle found risible the idea of an unprecedented, infernal assault on New England’s churches. He feared a different diabolical design. Turning
the tables, he suggested—one wonders who his correspondent was, as Brattle was well beyond sedition by his sixth paragraph—that the court participated in “an hellish design to ruin and destroy this poor land.” He had no time for Willard’s chary, painstakingly open-ended conclusions. If people were imprisoned purely on complaints of the afflicted, and the afflicted acted on information provided by the devil, then the justices themselves collaborated with the devil. The infernal agents sat, in their dark gowns, on the bench; the Salem gentlemen were actually the ones possessed, “with ignorance and folly.” Brattle reserved his compassion not for the convulsing girls, as did the authorities, or the hardworking justices, as did the Mathers, but for the husbands who had mistrusted and misled wives, for John Willard and John Procter, who had displayed such nobility in their last minutes, and for New England itself.
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He alone voiced several wider concerns. How might anyone involved in the trials not later “look back upon these things without the greatest of sorrow and grief imaginable?” He trembled at the thought, the first to anticipate an indelible stain on New England, one that ages would not remove.

Brattle knew the future of the court was among the first matters to be discussed at the meeting of the legislative assembly on October 12, four days after he wrote. He hoped the assembly would disband it. If not, “I think we may conclude that N.E. is undone and undone.” Just before that session, Phips received the second opinion he had sought in New York. Its Protestant clergymen fielded eight concise questions, moving from the global—did witches exist?—to the particular. What proof served to convict, what role did a fine reputation or a prior transgression play, and was spectral evidence sufficient for conviction? It is clear from the queries what the sticking points had become; Brattle was not alone in wondering
about the village girls. Could the French Huguenot and three Dutch Calvinist ministers explain how those daily fending off diabolical assaults remained in such strapping good health?

The New York ministers and the Massachusetts ministers communicated in their sole common language, which was Latin. Fellow Calvinists, they saw eye to eye. The New Yorkers shared the Massachusetts missive as well with an especially learned, idealistic young Trinity graduate, newly arrived in New York as chaplain to the English forces and, at that point, the sole working Episcopal clergyman in the province.
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All agreed; the devil indeed made cunning use of “lies, miracles, promises, fictitious or real sensual indulgences, honors, riches, and other innumerable allurements.” He lured some into commerce with him; witchcraft consisted of that very pact. As to prior malice and unblemished reputations, the ministers had better news for the late Sarah Good than for the late Rebecca Nurse. The first was immaterial. Even a good man could find cause to dislike his neighbor. A fine reputation was worth little. Yet again a panel of experts deemed spectral evidence insufficient for conviction. To rely on that evidence alone “would be the greatest imprudence.” As for the girls, their robust health should give no pause. The devil, explained the New York ministers, could see to it that his victims grew stronger under their affliction, craving and swallowing “greater quantities of nourishment than before.” He operated as a kind of steroid. He could reverse all effects of torture.

That response arrived as Justice Sewall read Cotton Mather’s
Wonders of the Invisible World
. Mather had been hurtling toward the deadline of the October legislative session; he finished in the nick of time. On October 11, both Sewall and Stoughton attested to the accuracy of his account, in every possible respect different from Brattle’s. They also presented Mather’s pages as having been written at the direction of the governor. Phips had them—or Mather himself—on hand when he wrote to
London the following day, for the first time, of New England’s preternatural plague. At Stoughton’s advice, the governor had established a special court. He had subsequently been out of the province almost without interruption. He returned to mayhem. Many condemned the justices. Moreover, the devil had begun to impersonate innocents. For that reason, he now postponed further prosecutions. Wherever possible, he prohibited additional arrests. He made a point of specifying that he did so entirely on his own and before anyone prevailed upon him to do so. The situation was explosive; the king’s business suffered; the clamor endangered the fledgling administration. Some public servants had overreached; he was sorry to report that a few who owed the Crown better service had acted rashly. Phips’s enemies schemed to use the witchcraft against him, a matter of enough concern that he mentioned it twice. Those who preferred the old charter and envied his appointment sought to blacken his name. He awaited Their Majesties’ command.

That was the first the English authorities had officially heard of Massachusetts witchcraft. Phips’s October letter was also a tissue of lies. He had by no means been largely absent from the colony. He sounded as if he were writing from Sweden rather than Boston; he borrowed details from Mather’s description of that plague. He insisted the court ruled only with empirical evidence; a false claim, as Brattle, Dane, Willard, Wardwell, and later even Lawson confirmed. (Phips would speak always of “witchcraft or possession” but could not lean too heavily on the latter, given all that had happened. A Dutch minister would afterward refer to the Massachusetts epidemic as a “pretended witchcraft, or an unknown sickness.”) Phips had hardly acted without having been prevailed upon, and urgently; he had heard regularly from the Nurses. He concerned himself less with protecting Their Majesties’ innocent subjects than with safeguarding his precarious political position. He too sensed a plot afoot: they conspired to blame him! For the sake of public order, he had banned all publications concerning the witchcraft in any way, “because I saw a likelihood of kindling an inextinguishable flame.” (That was not without
precedent in Massachusetts, where an energetic printer had eked out a newssheet in 1690, published to prevent false reports. He was shut down within four days.
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) Phips awaited orders, a statement that was impractical if not disingenuous. Letters between the two worlds were, it was noted, “like the production of elephants, once almost in two years.” And if indeed he had decided to disband the court and halt prosecutions, he had not yet informed either his lieutenant governor or his legislature.

The ban on publications moreover applied only to volumes that did not bear the name Mather on the cover. Both
Cases of Conscience
and
Wonders of the Invisible World
slipped swiftly into print, artfully postdated 1693. The latter qualified as America’s first instant book. Garlanded in credentials, it advertised itself as having been “published by the special command of His Excellency the Governor.” Its publisher was Benjamin Harris, who had fared as well with
Memorable Providences
as he had poorly with the 1690 newssheet. Harris was no doubt delighted; he knew a bestseller when he saw one. Stoughton wrote a preface for the volume, with which he professed himself mildly surprised but immensely gratified. What a timely account, so carefully and moderately composed! The chief justice was particularly grateful for Mather’s painstaking efforts, “considering the place that I hold in the Court of Oyer and Terminer, still laboring and proceeding in the trial of the persons accused and convicted for witchcraft.” He especially appreciated the millenarian note; Mather drew from the stupendous events a rosy hint of the Second Coming. He had of course seen every shred of paper from which Mather worked.