Witch, Warlock, and Magician

33

Arthur Wilson, in his ‘Memoirs,’ furnishes a strange account of the practices in which Lady Essex, Mrs. Turner, and the conjurer took part. ‘The Countess of Essex,’ he says, ‘to strengthen her designs, finds out one of her own stamp, Mrs. Turner, a doctor of physic’s widow, a woman whom prodigality and looseness had brought low; yet her pride would make her fly any pitch, rather than fall into the jaws of Want. These two counsel together how they might stop the current of the Earl’s affection towards his wife, and make a clear passage for the Viscount in his place. To effect which, one Dr. Forman, a reputed conjurer (living at Lambeth) is found out; the women declare to him their grievances; he promises sudden help, and, to amuse them, frames many little pictures of brass and wax – some like the Viscount and Countess, whom he must unite and strengthen, others like the Earl of Essex, whom he must debilitate and weaken; and then with philtrous powders, and such drugs, he works upon their persons. And to practise what effects his arts would produce, Mrs. Turner, that loved Sir Arthur Manwaring (a gentleman then attending the Prince), and willing to keep him to her, gave him some of the powder, which wrought so violently with him, that through a storm of rain and thunder he rode fifteen miles one dark night to her house, scarce knowing where he was till he was there. Such is the devilish and mad rage of lust, heightened with art and fancy.

‘These things, matured and ripened by this juggler Forman, gave them assurance of happy hopes. Her courtly incitements, that drew the Viscount to observe her, she imputed to the operation of those drugs he had tasted; and that harshness and stubborn comportment she expressed to her husband, making him (weary of such entertainments) to absent himself, she thought proceeded from the effects of those unknown potions and powders that were administered to him. So apt is the imagination to take impressions of those things we are willing to believe.

‘The good Earl, finding his wife nurseled in the Court, and seeing no possibility to reduce her to reason till she were estranged from the relish and taste of the delights she sucked in there, made his condition again known to her father. The old man, being troubled with his daughter’s disobedience, embittered her, being near him, with wearisome and continued chidings, to wean her from the sweets she doted upon, and with much ado forced her into the country. But how harsh was the parting, being sent away from the place where she grew and flourished! Yet she left all her engines and imps behind her: the old doctor and his confederate, Mrs. Turner, must be her two supporters. She blazons all her miseries to them at her depart, and moistens the way with her tears. Chartley was an hundred miles from her happiness; and a little time thus lost is her eternity. When she came thither, though in the pleasantest part of the summer, she shut herself up in her chamber, not suffering a beam of light to peep upon her dark thoughts. If she stirred out of her chamber, it was in the dead of the night, when sleep had taken possession of all others but those about her. In this implacable, sad, and discontented humour, she continued some months, always murmuring against, but never giving the least civil respect to, her husband, which the good man suffered patiently, being loth to be the divulger of his own misery; yet, having a manly courage, he would sometimes break into a little passion to see himself slighted and neglected; but having never found better from her, it was the easier to bear with her.

34

See ‘The State Trials;’ ‘The Carew Letters;’ Spedding, ‘Life and Letters of Lord Bacon;’ Amos, ‘The Grand Oyer of Poisoning;’ and S. R. Gardiner, ‘History of England,’ vol. iv., 1607-1616.

35

Horace Walpole (Earl of Orford), ‘Letters,’ v. 290, et seq.

36

See also Louis Figuier’s ‘L’Alchimie et les Alchimistes,’ a popular and agreeable survey; and the more erudite work of Professor Buhle.

37

This is sometimes ascribed to Joachim Fritz, but no one can doubt that virtually it is Fludd’s, who accompanied it with a defence of his general philosophical teaching, entitled ‘Sophiæ cum Moriâ Certamen.’ But whose was ‘the Wisdom,’ and whose ‘the Folly’?

38

Waite, ‘History of the Rosicrucians,’ p. 385.

39

Author of ‘A Defence of Judiciall Astrologie,’ printed at Cambridge in 1603.

40

So in Duclerq’s ‘Memoires’ (‘Collect. du Panthéon’), p. 141, we read of a case at Arras, in which the sorcerers were accused of using such an ointment: ‘D’ung oignement que le diable leur avoit baillé, ils oindoient une vergue de bois bien petite, et leurs palmes et leurs mains, puis mectoient celle virguelte entre leurs jambes, et tantost ils s’en volvient où ils voullvient estre, purdesseures bonnes villes, bois et cams; et les portoit le diable au lieu où ils debvoient faire leur assemblée.’

41

That is, of sacrificing to the Evil One, of meeting the demon Robert Artisson, and so on; though it is quite possible that strange unguents were made and administered to different persons, and that Dame Alice and her companions played at being sorcerers. Some of the so-called witches, as we shall see, encouraged the deception on account of the influence it gave them.

42

Thomas Pott’s ‘Wonderful Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancashire’ (1615), reprinted by the Chetham Society, 1845.

43

Potts, ‘Wonderful Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster’ (1613).

44

Pitcairn, ‘Criminal Trials,’ i. 49-58. This chapter is mainly founded on the reports in Pitcairn.

45

Pitcairn, ut ante, i. 192, 202, 285.

46

So the witch in ‘Macbeth’ (Act I., sc. 3) says:

‘In a sieve I’ll thither sail.’

47

It is a singular circumstance, as Pitcairn remarks, that in almost all the confessions of witches, or at least of the Scottish witches, their initiation, and many of their meetings, are said to have taken place within churches, churchyards, and consecrated ground; and a certain ritual, in imitation, or mockery, of the forms of the Church, is uniformly said to have been gone through.

48

In the Forfarshire reports, alluded to on p. 332, the witches always speak of the devil’s body and kiss as deadly cold.

49

Pitcairn remarks, with justice, that the above details are, perhaps, in all respects the most extraordinary in the history of witchcraft of this or of any other country. Isabel Gowdie must have been a woman with a powerful and rank imagination, who, had she lived in the present day, might, perhaps, have produced a work of fiction of the school of Zola.

50

There are mutilations in the original manuscript, and the bracketed words are conjectural.

51

There are mutilations in the original manuscript, and the bracketed words are conjectural.

52

There are mutilations in the original manuscript, and the bracketed words are conjectural.

53

There are mutilations in the original manuscript, and the bracketed words are conjectural.

54

There are mutilations in the original manuscript, and the bracketed words are conjectural.

55

There are mutilations in the original manuscript, and the bracketed words are conjectural.

56

These, it is needless to say, were pure inventions, and by no means amusing ones.

57

From the ‘Records of the Burgh of Aberdeen,’ printed for the Spalding Club, 1841.

58

Some authorities doubt the authorship; but the internal evidence seems to me to justify the claim made for it as Defoe’s.