English Catholics and the Supernatural, 1553-1829 [Reprint ed.] 1409455653, 9781409455653, 9781315579726

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English Catholics and the Supernatural, 1553–1829

In memoriam Jonael Angelus Schickler (1976–2002) This page has been left blank intentionally

English Catholics and the Supernatural, 1553–1829 FRANcIs YOUNG

First published 2013 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2013 Francis Young Francis Young has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Young, Francis. English Catholics and the supernatural, 1553–1829. – (Catholic Christendom, 1300–1700) 1. Occultism – Religious aspects – Catholic Church. 2. Supernatural (Theology) – History of doctrines. 3. Catholic Church – England – History – 16th century. 4. Catholic Church – England – History – 17th century. 5. Catholic Church – England – History – 18th century. I. Title II. Series 261.5’13’09–dc23 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Young, Francis. English Catholics and the supernatural, 1553–1829 / by Francis Young. p. cm. – (Catholic Christendom, 1300–1700) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 978–1–4094–5565–3 (hardcover : alk. paper) – 1. Catholic Church – England – History. 2. England – Church history – 1485– 3. Occultism – Religious aspects – Catholic Church. 4. Parapsychology – Religious aspects – Catholic Church. 5. Supernatural (Theology) 6. Exorcism – England – History. 7. Catholic Church – Doctrines. I. Title. BX1492.Y68 2012 282’.420903–dc23

ISBN 9781409455653 (hbk) ISBN 9781315579726 (ebk)

Contents Series Editor’s Preface   vii Abbreviations   ix Prefacexi Introduction   Church, Community and Reformation   Catholics and the Supernatural   Sources   Structure  

1 6 11 17 20

1

Early Modern Catholics and ‘Superstition’   Supernaturalism, ‘Superstition’ and the Roots of Scepticism   Catholic and Sub-Catholic   Mystical Recusancy   English Catholics and the Devil   Catholic Aristotelianism and Scepticism of the Supernatural  

25

Catholicism, Enlightenment and ‘Superstition’   Jesuits, Jansenists and the Supernatural   Pope and the Supernatural   English Catholics and the ‘New Philosophy’   The Supernatural and the Birth of Emancipation, 1778–1829  

55 56 64 68

2

3

26 33 38 40 44

71

Ghosts and Apparitions in the English Catholic Community   79 The Early Modern Ghost Narrative   80 English Catholic Commentary on Ghosts   82 Ghosts and Purgatory   89 Oral Traditions   97 Catholic Ghost Narratives of the Reformation   100 Catholic Ghost Narratives of the Eighteenth Century   103 English Catholics and the Romantic Ghost Story   109

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Catholics, Witchcraft and Magic in Reformation England   Catholic and Protestant on Witchcraft   Catholics as Witches in Reformation England   Witchcraft versus Recusancy: The Case of the Samlesbury Witches   Witchcraft and the Catholic Mission   Catholics, Magic and Astrology  

117 119 134

Catholics and Witchcraft in the Age of Enlightenment   Jacobitism and Witchcraft   Catholics and Witchcraft in England   Witchcraft and English Catholics Abroad   ‘This Uncommon Subject’: Gregory Greenwood’s Three Discourses   

163 166 169 171

Dealing with the Devil: Catholic Exorcisms   The Reformation and the Evolution of Exorcism   Catholic Exorcisms through Protestant Eyes   Exorcism and the Catholic Mission   ‘The Devil in the Convent’: Exorcism in Religious Communities   Catholic Exorcisms of Haunted Houses   The Legacy of Folklore   Sceptical Responses   Decline and Revival: Exorcism in the Age of Enlightenment  

189 192 197 203

5

6

144 151 157

176

209 217 220 222 223

Appendix 1: Documented Catholic Exorcisms in England, 1577–1815  

231

Appendix 2: ‘Three Discourses of Witches and Witchcraft’ by Gregory Greenwood  

235

Bibliography   Index  

275 295

Series Editor’s Preface The still-usual emphasis on medieval (or Catholic) and reformation (or Protestant) religious history has meant neglect of the middle ground, both chronological and ideological. As a result, continuities between the middle ages and early modern Europe have been overlooked in favor of emphasis on radical discontinuities. Further, especially in the later period, the identification of ‘reformation’ with various kinds of Protestantism means that the vitality and creativity of the established church, whether in its Roman or local manifestations, has been left out of account. In the last few years, an upsurge of interest in the history of traditional (or catholic) religion makes these inadequacies in received scholarship even more glaring and in need of systematic correction. The series will attempt this by covering all varieties of religious behavior, broadly interpreted, not just (or even especially) traditional institutional and doctrinal church history. It will to the maximum degree possible be interdisciplinary, comparative and global, as well as non-confessional. The goal is to understand religion, primarily of the ‘Catholic’ variety, as a broadly human phenomenon, rather than as a privileged mode of access to superhuman realms, even implicitly. The period covered, 1300–1700, embraces the moment which saw an almost complete transformation of the place of religion in the life of Europeans, whether considered as a system of beliefs, as an institution, or as a set of social and cultural practices. In 1300, vast numbers of Europeans, from the pope down, fully expected Jesus’s return and the beginning of His reign on earth. By 1700, very few Europeans, of whatever level of education, would have subscribed to such chiliastic beliefs. Pierre Bayle’s notorious sarcasms about signs and portents are not idiosyncratic. Likewise, in 1300 the vast majority of Europeans probably regarded the pope as their spiritual head; the institution he headed was probably the most tightly integrated and effective bureaucracy in Europe. Most Europeans were at least nominally Christian, and the pope had at least nominal knowledge of that fact. The papacy, as an institution, played a central role in high politics, and the clergy in general formed an integral part of most governments, whether central or local. By 1700, Europe was divided into a myriad of different religious allegiances, and even those areas officially subordinate to the pope were both more nominally Catholic in belief (despite colossal efforts at imposing uniformity) and also in allegiance than they had been four hundred years earlier. The pope had become only

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one political factor, and not one of the first rank. The clergy, for its part, had virtually disappeared from secular governments as well as losing much of its local authority. The stage was set for the Enlightenment. Thomas F. Mayer Augustana College

Abbreviations Bellenger

Bellenger, D.A., English and Welsh Priests 1558–1800 (Bath: Downside Abbey, 1984) CRS Catholic Record Society CSPD Calendar of State Papers Domestic CUL Cambridge University Library Foley Foley, H., Records of the English Province of the Society of Jesus (London: various publishers, 1877–83), 8 vols Jerningham Castle, E. (ed.), The Jerningham Letters (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1896), 2 vols MS(S) Manuscript(s) Pope, Poems Pope, A. (ed. J. Butt), The Poems of Alexander Pope (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963) Salisbury MSS Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Most Hon. the Marquis of Salisbury (London: HMSO, 1883–1976), 24 vols SRO(B) Suffolk Record Office, Bury St Edmunds Three Discourses Gregory Greenwood, ‘Three Discourses of Witches and Witchcraft’, Downside Abbey MS 566

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Preface In 2009, in the course of research for an article on Catholic exorcisms, I was struck by the absence of any literature on the relationship between Catholicism and belief in witchcraft. This was a surprising omission, since possession was so often blamed on ‘bewitchment’. As there was no literature integrating the study of the Catholic community with the history of English witchcraft, I felt it necessary to write this book if Catholic exorcism was to be fully understood. For that reason two chapters of the book are devoted to witchcraft and one to exorcism. Witchcraft and exorcism, however, are not the only subjects of the book, since it became necessary to situate these phenomena within the wider context of Catholic responses to the supernatural (or preternatural). The chapters on the English Counter-Reformation’s and the English Catholic Enlightenment’s approaches to the definition of ‘superstition’ and the chapter on ghosts are part of what is apparently, I hope, an integrated and coherent study. I have incurred many debts of gratitude during the writing of this book. I am indebted to the Abbot and Community of Downside Abbey and to Dr Simon Johnston for allowing me access to the Abbey’s archives. I am grateful to the helpful staff of the British Library’s Manuscripts Room, the Essex and Suffolk Record Offices and Cambridgeshire Archives as well as Fr John Sharp of Birmingham Archdiocesan Archives. The staff of Cambridge University Library’s Manuscripts and Rare Books Rooms, where I have conducted a large proportion of my research over the past few years, have been unfailingly patient and helpful. The Rt Revd Dom Geoffrey Scott kindly read an early draft of a portion of the text and I am grateful to him for his comments, as I am to Professor Maurice Whitehead, who similarly offered his advice on part of the text. I thank my sister Naomi Young for her advice on the improvement of style and expression. Jonathan Burden and Ruth Crabtree were kind enough to check the accuracy of my Latin and French translations respectively. Perhaps most importantly, my wife Rachel Hilditch has supported my research with infinite patience and offered her wise insights on the manuscript. I acknowledge with thanks the permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library to reproduce the mezzotint of ghosts at Coldham Hall. I am grateful for the comments of the reviewer commissioned by Ashgate to assess the suitability of this work for publication, and to Tom Gray and Celia Barlow, the editors at Ashgate who have guided the book through

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the publication process. I thank Jeanne Brady for proof-reading the text. Naturally, I take full responsibility for any errors or omissions in the text. All dates before 1752 are Old Style (with the year taken to begin on 1 January) with the exception of dates taken from sources written on the Continent, which are New Style. In extracts from sources the original spelling has been retained, although I have silently modified ‘u’ to ‘v’ and ‘v’ to ‘u’ in accordance with contemporary typographical convention. I have expanded the letter thorn (‘y’) to ‘th’ in all cases, and expanded abbreviations such as ‘wch’ and ‘wth’ by insertions between square brackets within the word itself, for example, ‘w[hi]ch’, w[i]th’. Insertions in the MS sources are placed between strokes thus ‘\ .. /’. Longer quotations from primary sources in Latin, French and Spanish have been translated, whilst shorter quotations are given in the original language with an accompanying translation. Quotations from secondary literature in languages other than English are given in translation. Unless otherwise stated all translations are my own. In Appendix 2, portions of Gregory Greenwood’s text that are close paraphrases of sections of the 1613 English translation of the Pneumalogia of Sebastian Michaelis are italicized. No attempt has been made to retain the layout of the original text. I omit Latin quotations translated by Greenwood in the text and indicate their position with ‘[Latin quotation]’ in order to avoid repetition. Francis Young Ely, Cambridgeshire

Introduction In Alexander Pope’s poem The Rape of the Lock (1714), the sylph Ariel, hovering close to the ear of Belinda (the Catholic society beauty Arabella Fermor) discloses the existence of the invisible world that surrounds her:1 If e’er one Vision touch’d thy infant Thought, Of all the Nurse and all the Priest have taught, Of airy Elves by Moonlight Shadows seen, The silver Token, and the circled Green, Or Virgins visited by Angel-pow’rs, With Golden Crowns and Wreaths of heavn’ly Flow’rs, Hear and believe!

Pope’s satire, interpreted in one way at least, argued that little distinguished the ‘airy Elves’ of old wives’ tales from the miraculous stories told by priests (‘Virgins visited by Angel-pow’rs’). Pope may have thought little of either nurse or priest, yet ‘all the Nurse and all the Priest have taught’ concerning the supernatural is the subject of this book. It is an enquiry into how English Catholics like Arabella Fermor really responded to the supernatural world, whether they knew of it from folklore (the ‘nurse’), or religious instruction (the ‘priest’). On the one hand, Catholics were part of their national and local communities and participated with other English people in a common heritage of popular religion. On the other hand, Catholics had their own clergy, trained abroad and suspected and loathed by many in England. Catholic missionaries sowed a new, vigorous and exotic-seeming Counter-Reformation spirituality amongst the followers of the ‘old faith’ in England, who consequently reinterpreted their beliefs in terms of Continental ideas. This book explores the question of what primarily conditioned the response of English Catholics to the supernatural: was it their participation in the culture of early modern England, or the specific doctrinal preoccupations of Counter-Reformation Catholicism? Would Arabella Fermor have paid more heed to her nurse who, whether Catholic or nonCatholic, embodied a collective cultural inheritance, or would the impact of nursery tales on her attitudes have been negligible when compared with 1

  Pope, A., ‘The Rape of the Lock’, Canto I, ll. 29–35 (Poems, p. 219).

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2

her education in the Catholic faith? In the chapters that follow, I shall argue that, when it came to interpreting the supernatural, Catholic attitudes were conditioned primarily by their English cultural context rather than the Counter-Reformation. This conclusion has important consequences for our understanding of the English Catholic community as a whole. If English Catholics were not significantly different from their non-Catholic neighbours in their attitudes to the weird, the invisible and the uncanny, then the idea that they were culturally and intellectually ‘other’ elsewhere cannot be accepted without persuasive evidence and may need to be revised. In 1955, the Catholic collector of ghost narratives Shane Leslie argued that the forcible separation of Catholics from English society through the recusancy laws meant that they developed their own culture of the supernatural: ‘The old Catholic families kept apart from the national trend, were penalized and became self-centred and inter-married. They evolved types of the uncanny of their own.’2 Leslie’s view was grounded in the historiography of his era, which reduced Catholicism to recusancy and assumed that Catholic identity corresponded to the state’s legal definition of recusants.3 Catholic history was a history of the judicial persecution of a legally marginalized minority united in suffering for the faith. Inevitably, perhaps, the triumphalism of the late nineteenth-century church and the persecution of religious minorities in Nazi and Communist Europe combined to produce a martyrological and hagiographical approach to the history of the embattled Catholic community, with a disproportionate focus on the dark years of Queen Elizabeth.4 Three historians did more than anyone else to revise this view of English Catholicism in the 1970s: John Bossy, Hugh Aveling and Eamon Duffy. Bossy was the first modern historian of the English Catholic community, drawing attention to the status of Catholicism as one variety of religious nonconformity among many and distancing himself from the hagiographical persecution narratives that came before.5 Aveling emphasized the outwardlooking, enlightened and enterprising nature of English Catholics, whilst 2

  Leslie, S., Shane Leslie’s Ghost Book (London: Hollis and Carter, 1955),

p. 56.

3   Questier, M., ‘Conformity, Catholicism and the Law’ in Lake, P. and Questier (eds), Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c. 1560–1660 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2000), pp. 237–61, at pp. 238–9. 4   See Hilary J. Carpenter’s preface to Anstruther, G., A Hundred Homeless Years; English Dominicans 1558–1658 (London: Blackfriars Publications, 1958), p. vii: ‘It was the persecution and propaganda combined, very like that behind the Iron Curtain in our own day, which shifted the allegiance of our people from the Catholic Church of Rome to the Protestant Church of England.’ 5   Bossy, J., The English Catholic Community 1570–1850, 2nd edition (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1979), p. 7.

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Duffy produced the first detailed, modern study of divisions within the eighteenth-century church.6 Henceforth English Catholicism would not be regarded as a monolithic, conservative and backward-looking remnant, but as a religious community with its own internal conflicts, dynamics and mixture of conservative and radical tendencies. The ‘revisionist’ historians paved the way not only for a reassessment of Elizabethan and Jacobean Catholicism but also for the development of studies of Restoration and eighteenth-century Catholicism, a period viewed until then as an era of stultification and decline. Since the beginning of the 1990s, Geoffrey Holt, Gabriel Glickman, Peter Marshall and Geoffrey Scott, amongst others, have focused attention on the period after 1688 in studies that have dealt with the Catholic community from both lay and clerical perspectives.7 The growth of interest in English Catholic history since the 1970s has chronologically paralleled, but rarely cross-fertilized, a growth of interest in popular religion and the supernatural. Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971) established a new historical orthodoxy that placed attitudes to the supernatural centre-stage in cultural, religious and social history. The attitude of a community towards sources of supernatural power, and towards the limits of reality as experienced by most human beings most of the time, has the potential to reveal a great deal about its internal stresses and anxieties. Virtually every aspect of the early modern world of belief mapped by Thomas has subsequently been re-trodden. However, both Thomas’s work and subsequent studies were regional or national in scope; relatively few attempted to isolate the attitudes of specific religious minorities to the supernatural and so illuminate a confessional dimension to popular religion. A notable exception is Sasha Handley’s exploration of ‘Confessional Cultures and Ghost Beliefs’ in the long eighteenth century, covering Anglican, Catholic and Quaker attitudes.8 David Hempton, Peter Elmer, Owen Davies and 6   Aveling, J.C.H., The Handle and the Axe (London: Blond and Briggs, 1976); Duffy, E., ‘“Over the Wall”: Converts from Popery in Eighteenth-Century England’, Downside Review 94 (1976), pp. 1–25; Duffy, E., ‘A rub-up for old soares; Jesuits, Jansenists, and the English Secular Clergy, 1705–1715’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 28 (1977), pp. 291–317; Glickman, G., The English Catholic Community 1688–1745: Politics, Culture and Ideology (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2009); Marshall, P. and Scott, G. (eds), Catholic Gentry in English Society: The Throckmortons of Coughton from Reformation to Emancipation (Farnham: Ashgate:, 2009). 7   Scott, G., Gothic Rage Undone: English Monks in the Age of Enlightenment (Bath: Downside Abbey, 1992); Holt, G., The English Jesuits in the Age of Reason (Tunbridge Wells: Burns and Oates, 1993). 8   Handley, S., Visions of an Unseen World: Ghost Beliefs and Ghost Stories in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2007), pp. 140–76.

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Phyllis Mack have explored the importance of supernatural phenomena such as ghosts and witchcraft to early Methodists, Quakers and other dissenters,9 while Ian Bostridge has illuminated the extent to which their attitude to witchcraft defined the theological aspirations of embattled high churchmen in the early eighteenth century.10 The importance of exorcism to the Catholic mission was first noted by Thomas and acknowledged by Bossy, yet the matter was not treated in anything but a cursory manner until Alexandra Walsham wrote on the subject in 2003.11 Peter Marshall dealt with Catholic ghost narratives of the Reformation period in 2002.12 Related issues, such as the relationship between Catholics and witchcraft, have received no consideration in print whatsoever, and the question of whether the Catholic community approached supernatural phenomena as a whole in a distinctive way, throughout the period of penal legislation, went unanswered.13 As a result, a significant area of the spiritual, cultural and intellectual world of English Catholics remained largely unmapped. The use of the term ‘supernatural’ in the title of a book concerned with ghosts, witchcraft and the devil is a conscious anachronism. For sixteenthand seventeenth-century Christians, the supernatural was the realm of God. However, since the nineteenth century, the use of ‘supernatural’ to refer to the divine – outside theology anyway – has fallen into disuse and most contemporary readers understand the supernatural as referring to beings other than God. I use the term ‘supernatural’ here in preference to ‘preternatural’ for two main reasons. ‘Preternatural’ is a theological term 9   Hempton, D., The Religion of the People: Methodism and Popular Religion c. 1750 –1900 (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 23–34; Elmer, P., ‘“Saints or Sorcerers”: Quakerism, Demonology and the Decline of Witchcraft in SeventeenthCentury England’ in Barry, J., Hester, M. and Roberts, G. (eds), Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe: Studies in Culture and Belief (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 145–82; Davies, O., ‘Methodism, the Clergy, and the Popular Belief in Witchcraft and Magic’, History 82 (1997), pp. 252–65; Mack, P., ‘Religious Dissenters in Enlightenment England’, History Workshop Journal 49 (2000), pp. 1–23. 10   Bostridge, I., Witchcraft and its Transformations c. 1650–c.1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 163–5. 11   Walsham, A., ‘Miracles and the Counter-Reformation Mission to England’, The Historical Journal 46 (2003), pp. 779–815, at pp. 812–13. 12   Marshall, P., Beliefs and the Dead in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 236–64. 13   Deborah Lea’s unpublished PhD thesis, ‘Witchcraft, Possession and Confessional Tension in Early Modern Lancashire’ (University of Liverpool, 2011) examined the interplay of Lancashire recusancy with witchcraft accusations and possession but its scope was local rather than national, limiting the evidence on which Lea could draw.

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that, albeit narrower in scope and more precise, is somewhat recondite. In practice, an individual’s attitude to miracles, sacramentals and devotional practices (the ‘supernatural’) often had a strong bearing on their attitude to witchcraft, ghosts and the power of the devil (the ‘preternatural’). I therefore take the category of the ‘supernatural’, for the purposes of this study, to embrace all spiritual powers – good, evil or neutral – on the grounds that beliefs in the immanence of spiritual power in the world, whether for good or evil, tend to correlate. Likewise, in the early modern period, scepticism concerning miracles tended to go hand-in-hand with scepticism concerning demonic activity. Since the supernatural can be defined so broadly, this study does not claim to be a comprehensive survey of Catholic responses to all phenomena and experiences that could conceivably be termed ‘supernatural’. So, for instance, whilst it discusses later Catholic responses to miracles in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this study largely passes over the miracles attributed to the Catholic martyrs in the sixteenth century (a subject that has been ably treated by Ann Dillon and Alexandra Walsham). Likewise, the ‘supernatural’ could include any Catholic interpretation of the activity of God’s grace in the sacraments, the operation of divine providence, and visions and apparitions of the Virgin Mary and angels.14 This book is selective in its consideration of the ‘supernatural’, and focuses primarily on the ‘night side’ of the invisible world: ghosts, witchcraft and demonic possession. All of these were matters of concern to Protestants throughout the period covered, whereas other aspects of the Catholic definition of the ‘supernatural’ were of internal theological interest only. This book’s concentration on the ‘night side’ is intended to open up the possibility of fruitful comparisons between Catholic and non-Catholic attitudes.

14   Walsham, A., Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 232–4 (on Catholics and providence); Dillon, A., The Construction of Martyrdom in the English Catholic Community, 1535–1603 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), pp. 95–105 (on the miracles attributed to the martyrs). On the role of angels, see Marshall, P. and Walsham, A., ‘Migrations of Angels in the Early Modern World’, in Marshall and Walsham (eds), Angels in the Early Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 1–40; Walsham, A., ‘Invisible Helpers: Angelic Intervention in Post-Reformation England’, Past and Present 208 (2010), pp. 77–130, at p. 84; Walsham, A., ‘Catholic Reformation and the Cult of Angels in Post-Reformation England’, in Raymond, J. (ed.), Conversations with Angels: Essays towards a History of Spiritual Communication, 1100–1700 (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011), pp. 273–94.

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Church, Community and Reformation Bossy defined the English Catholic community as ‘the body of Catholics as a social whole and in relation to itself, with its internal constitution and the internal logic of its history’.15 This book embraces that definition. Bossy’s approach to the English Catholic community allowed him to treat Catholics as a single body and thereby avoid a narrow ecclesiastical history of the clergy on the one hand and a hagiographic genealogical study of lay gentry on the other. Since the relationship between clergy and laity was hardly conventional in English Catholicism, the methods and sources of traditional church history often fail to do justice to its complexity. The question of who in early modern England should be regarded as a Catholic is one that has been much discussed since the publication of Walsham’s Church Papists (1993).16 Walsham’s argument that the majority who remained loyal in spirit to Catholicism were occasional conformists rather than out-and-out recusants has largely been accepted. Michael Questier has taken the argument still further, arguing that those who considered themselves Catholics adopted a variety of creative approaches to religious conformity. Catholicism ‘was not a neat, simple and unproblematic religious category’.17 However, when the category of ‘Catholics’ is broadened to include all religious conservatives in early modern England, the notion of a ‘Catholic community’ (essential to Bossy’s historiography) dissolves. This was not Questier’s intention, but if taken too far, his approach is in danger of distorting our picture of Catholics. Attachment to Catholic rites cannot be taken as evidence of Catholicism in itself, and the distinction between self-conscious Catholics and the nostalgic ‘sub-Catholic’ majority in Elizabethan England was a real one. Nevertheless, not every individual considered in this book was, at every point of their life, an avowed and public Catholic. I have not excluded individuals from this study just because they were not recusants. However, where the exact nature of an individual’s relationship with the Catholic church is unclear, I have described them as ‘crypto-Catholic’. Church Papists, occasional conformists and semi-separatists used casuistry and the law to alleviate their situation, thus placing themselves firmly in the early modern rather than the mediaeval world. ‘English’ Catholics, for the purpose of this study, were individuals who either thought of themselves as English (whether or not they lived in England or had ever done so), or who became part of the English church 15 16

  Bossy (1979), p. 5.   Walsham, A., Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity and Confessional

Polemic in Early Modern England (London: Royal Historical Society, 1993). 17   Questier (2000), p. 260.

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by their involvement in it. Bossy, by contrast, treated only Catholics who remained in England. After 1559, many Catholics spent their entire lives outside England, and many of them never wrote in English, using Latin instead as their primary medium of communication. However, they belonged to English colleges and monasteries and prayed for England’s conversion. At a later period, Jacobite exiles such as Anthony Hamilton wrote entirely in French, and Irish and European Catholic émigrés began to settle in England and participated in the life of the English church. These too were English Catholics, early representatives of the nineteenth century’s cosmopolitan Catholicism. The starting date for this study, 1553, was the year in which Mary Tudor inherited the English crown and the English Counter-Reformation began.18 Since the history of English Catholicism is the history of the CounterReformation in England, English Catholicism needs to be considered a distinct part of that movement from the beginning of Mary’s reign. Bossy’s view that the history of English Catholicism up to the foundation of the English College at Douai (1561) is the ‘posthumous history’ of pre-Reformation Christendom in England has been comprehensively challenged since 1979, most recently by Duffy.19 The personnel of the Marian restoration went on to lead the European Counter-Reformation as well as efforts to reconvert England. In the 1550s, sceptical Counter-Reformation attitudes to the supernatural were first articulated by Miles Hogarde and Edmund Bonner. Cardinal Reginald Pole’s ‘Augustinian’ views on grace foreshadowed the theological radicalism of Michael Baius and Cornelius Jansen. Pole was the first of several English Catholics who might be described as representatives of the ‘radical Counter-Reformation’. These were individuals committed to Catholicism, whose enthusiasm for reform and reinterpretation arguably exceeded the theological scope of the Council of Trent’s decrees and dramatically distanced them from mediaeval Catholicism. The effect of Marian Catholics on Europe was mirrored in England by the dismantling of all that the early Counter-Reformation achieved there. Elizabethan Catholics were presented with a stark choice between compromising their faith by attending church, or staying away and risking punitive fines. The remaining Marian clergy, deprived of their livings on account of their refusal to accept the Act of Uniformity, were succeeded from the mid-1570s onwards by seminary priests and Jesuits from the Continental colleges, heralding the dawn of a dynamic yet chaotic mission that both sustained and transformed the faith of Elizabethan Catholics.   Duffy, E., Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), pp. 1–28. 19   Bossy (1979), p. 4. For a survey of the recent revisionist literature see Duffy (2009), pp. 2–3. 18

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The Jesuits were as relentlessly persecuted by the authorities as they were determined to bring people to the Catholic faith by whatever means lay to hand, including unrestrained promotion of exorcism and the miraculous. Catholics were isolated by the laws of the land from their fellow countrymen as a self-contained religious minority in a manner different from most other confessional groups. In contrast to the Catholics of the Dutch Netherlands and the German Lutheran states, England’s Catholics were never sufficiently concentrated in any one area to form a geographically defined community. Scattered Catholic families were bound together by social rather than geographical ties, and a disproportionate number of established landed gentry families predominated. The elite character of English Catholicism (or at least its elite leadership) was a key reason for its survival. The relative wealth of Catholics compared with the rest of the population led successive governments to impose financial rather than capital penalties on the Catholic laity. Recusants became a cash cow for the government. Provided they were sufficiently inventive with their financial and legal arrangements, the nature of the persecution gave Catholic families the crucial breathing space to survive. In spite of their status as a minority religion in a resolutely Protestant nation, English Catholics were proud of their Englishness and keen to retain and proclaim it even when forced into exile. Unlike the Marian reevangelization of England, in which Italian and Spanish clergy were involved, the mission to Elizabethan England was almost invariably conducted by Englishmen. The English colleges on the Continent nurtured expatriate communities of men and women who, even if they never returned home, were proud to be English. Most importantly, however, these institutions educated the next generation of clerical and lay Catholic leaders. The fact that their curricula did not depend in any obvious way on cultural and intellectual developments in England did not make them any less English, and they produced controversialists and original thinkers such as Thomas White, who could stand comparison with the greatest of Protestant intellectuals. Since the English clergy and lay elite were trained in colleges located in France, the Austrian Netherlands, Spain, Portugal and Rome, it was inevitable that their beliefs and attitudes should be affected by the Continental cultures in which they were immersed. The fact that Latin was usually the sole medium of instruction in the English colleges allowed teachers of all nationalities to have a hand in forming priests for the English mission. Latin was the learned language of the English universities as well, and using it guaranteed that at least some of the Protestant elite would come into contact with Catholic works. On the other hand, Latin limited the conceptual world of theologians and sometimes blinded them to the way issues were understood in England itself, a notable example being the difference between Continental and English interpretations of

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witchcraft. More recently, the traditional exclusion of Latin-language works from English literary and intellectual history has had the unintended consequence that the thought of Catholics, who were more likely than anyone else to write in Latin, was often overlooked and it is only now that this oversight is being remedied.20 Elizabeth’s government saw in the haphazard organization of the Catholic mission and the zeal of the Jesuits the potential to divide the Catholic community. Accordingly, it sponsored members of the secular clergy confined in Wisbech Castle to write in opposition to Jesuits who refused the Oath of Allegiance to Elizabeth. Further controversies concerning ecclesiastical government followed; England was without Catholic bishops, and proposals to put the secular clergy under the rule of an ‘Archpriest’ allegedly sympathetic to the Jesuits further divided the community. The Archpriest and Appellant Controversies left their mark on Catholic attitudes to the supernatural, with the secular clergy generally suspicious of the Jesuit emphasis on the miraculous. The secular clergy’s suspicion of the miraculous re-emerged in a radical form in the 1640s. In the aftermath of the Civil War, with the prospect of religious liberty, the Chapter of the English secular clergy came to be dominated by a faction that accepted the republican status quo, led by Thomas White, Kenelm Digby and John Sergeant. The ‘Blackloists’ argued for the reinterpretation of Catholic doctrines such as purgatory and transubstantiation, and took up sceptical stances on such issues as the reality of exorcisms, ghosts and witchcraft. However, with the restoration of the monarchy, the Blackloists, an embarrassment to Protestants and Catholics alike, were rejected as part of the Restoration backlash against the unbelief of the Commonwealth Protectorate. English Catholic commentators returned to the traditional categories of Scholastic theology to defend the reality of miracles. The accession of the Catholic King James II in 1685 proved a shortlived and illusory golden age for English Catholics. James’s attempts to legislate for toleration made Catholics who had tried hard to live quiet and unobtrusive lives the centre of attention, and they suffered for it after the Revolution of 1688. The creation of a Jacobite ‘shadow court’ at St Germain-en-Laye not only produced political divisions between English Catholics on the wisdom of supporting the exiled King and his heirs, but   For instance, none of the three major catalogues of English Catholic books have included Latin works (Allison, A.F. and Rogers, D.M., Catalogue of Catholic Books in English printed abroad or secretly in England 1558–1640 (Bognor Regis: Arundel Press, 1956), 2 vols; Clancy, T.H., English Catholic Books 1641–1700: A Bibliography (Chicago, IL: Loyola University Press, 1974); Blom, F., Blom, J., Korsten, F. and Scott, G., English Catholic Books 1701–1800: A Bibliography (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996). 20

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also brought them into contact with the Jansenist controversy within the French church and Gallicanism, the notion that the French church was independent of Papal jurisdiction. Although Jansenism was never a popular movement within the English church, with its austere rejection of ‘means of grace’, it became a rallying point for those opposed to Jesuit excesses and tended to go hand-in-hand with a cautious approach to the supernatural. The first half of the eighteenth century was a difficult period for English Catholics, suspected of disloyalty, heavily taxed and declining in numbers. The Catholic poet Alexander Pope sought to transform Catholics’ marginalized status into a strength by claiming a moderate, rationalistic Catholicism as the religion of the Enlightenment. English Catholics were not alone in seeing a purified Catholicism as the religion of the Enlightenment par excellence, and recent scholarship has highlighted what Ulrich Lehner called the ‘bi-confessional, irenic erudite culture of religious Enlightenments in Europe’.21 By the mid-eighteenth century, the excesses of baroque piety were under attack throughout Europe, and Catholic priests were as likely to condemn ‘superstition’ and ‘enthusiasm’ as their Protestant counterparts. Authors of the period emphasized the importance of good education for the clergy so that they could tackle ignorance and superstition, motivated by a rationalistic outlook that would protect them from credulity, whilst keeping them within the limits of orthodox Catholic belief.22 Although they did not deny the reality of miracles altogether, Catholic Enlightenment authors stressed their extreme rarity.23 By the 1750s, the ‘New Philosophy’ of mechanism had begun to take hold even within the conservative English colleges, and in the 1770s, Catholics began to hope for more than de facto toleration from an Enlightenment state that proclaimed its indifference to the details of religious belief. The final death of Jacobitism liberated Catholics from political suspicion, and the most enthusiastic in the cause of emancipation (the ‘Cisalpines’) were as radical in their attitude to the supernatural as they were in their opposition to Papal authority. The conflict between the Cisalpines and their Papalist ‘ultramontane’ enemies was as fierce as   Lehner, U.L., ‘Introduction: the many faces of Catholic Enlightenment’ in Lehner, U.L. and Printy, M., A Companion to the Catholic Enlightenment in Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2010), pp. 1–62, at p. 46. On the European Catholic Enlightenment see also Sorkin, D., ‘Reform Catholicism and Religious Enlightenment’, Austrian History Yearbook 30 (1999), pp. 187–219; Printy, M., Enlightenment and the Creation of German Catholicism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 22   Souza, E.S., ‘The Catholic Enlightenment in Portugal’ in Lehner, U.L. and Printy, M., A Companion to the Catholic Enlightenment in Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2010), pp. 359–402, at p. 393. 23   Printy, M., ‘Catholic Enlightenment and Reform Catholicism in the Holy Roman Empire’ in Lehner and Printy (2010), pp. 165–214, at p. 198. 21

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the Appellant Controversy, and the Catholic community was still divided when political Emancipation arrived in 1829. Emancipation, a watershed in the history of English Catholicism, marks the end of this study. Emancipation not only freed English Catholics from their legal disabilities but also created the conditions for the restoration of the episcopal hierarchy in 1850. This brought the English mission to and end. From 1829, the English church was less insular and, arguably, less English as the influence of Rome and a rapidly growing Irish immigrant population came to dominate a newly confident church. Rome, Ireland and the converts of the Oxford Movement had a profound effect on the tradition of scepticism that had come to flourish in the quasiindependent missionary church. With the death of the last generation of pre-Emancipation clergy, that tradition was largely swamped by a more conventional approach to the supernatural that reflected Continental trends and the mid-nineteenth-century backlash against rationalism. Catholics and the Supernatural No single study has been made of the English Catholic community’s response to the supernatural, but individual aspects of the subject matter dealt with in this book have received scholarly treatment. In a European context, Counter-Reformation constructions of ‘superstition’ and responses to the supernatural have been treated by Stuart Clark, Helen Parish, William G. Naphy and Craig Harline. Euan Cameron, in an important and wideranging study, has continued this study into the early Enlightenment.24 No study of how English Catholics responded to the Counter-Reformation redefinition of superstition exists, although Walsham has drawn attention to the importance to English Catholics of supernatural providences. Walsham, along with Parish, has also examined the tendency of Catholic exiles such as Thomas Stapleton, Robert Parsons and Nicholas Harpsfield to mock Protestant ‘miracles’ as hypocritical frauds. Cameron has treated the controversy between the Catholic John Martiall and the Protestant James Calfhill concerning the cross (1565–66). This was a rare example of

  Clark, S., Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997); Naphy, W.G. and Parish, H.L., ‘Introduction’, in Naphy and Parish (eds), Religion and Superstition in Reformation Europe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), pp. 1–22; Harline, C., Miracles at the Jesus Oak: Histories of the Supernatural in Reformation Europe (New York: Doubleday, 2003); Cameron, E., Enchanted Europe: Superstition, Reason, and Religion, 1250–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 219–40. 24

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a debate in which Catholics replied to specific accusations of superstition made against them.25 One historiographical question of over-arching significance to the study of the English Reformation has caused historians to make a careful study of the evidence for ‘Catholic’ superstitions surviving into the Elizabethan era: to what extent, and when, did the English people cease to be ‘Catholic’ in their religious beliefs and practices? The issue of ‘Catholic survivalism’ in popular religion, evidenced for instance by the use of Catholic prayers as magical formulae, has attracted the attention of a large number of historians.26 Although a variety of reasons have been offered for the survival of a cosmetically ‘Catholic’ popular religion after 1559, Christopher Haigh’s argument that the new Protestant faith served the needs of a literate urban population but disenfranchised the rural poor encapsulates the essential idea of survivalism as a passive revolt against the religious forms imposed from above by the Elizabethan state.27 As such, popular religion was motivated by reluctance to accept alien and untried rites rather than a desire to hold on to Catholicism. A shortcoming of the ‘survivalist’ thesis is its potential to obscure the real nature of English Catholicism by tempting historians to conflate ‘survivalism’ with the missionary faith of self-conscious Catholics. Purkiss and Walsham have done a great deal to clarify this distinction.28 The relationship between the vestiges of pre-Reformation Catholicism and Counter-Reformation mission was by no means straightforward, and whilst the two sometimes 25   Walsham (2001), pp. 232–4; Parish, H.L., Monks, Miracles and Magic: Reformation Representations of the Medieval Church (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 158–9; Cameron (2010), pp. 207–10. 26   Brown, T., ‘Examples of Post-Reformation Folklore in Devon’, Folklore 72 (1961), pp. 388–99; Thomas, K., Religion and the Decline of Magic, 4th edn (London: Penguin, 1991), pp. 211–17; Rushton, P., ‘A Note on the Survival of Popular Christian Magic’, Folklore 91 (1980), pp. 115–18; Haigh, C., ‘The Continuity of Catholicism in the English Reformation’ in Haigh (ed.), The English Reformation Revised (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 176–208; Purkiss, D., The Witch in History: Early modern and twentieth-century representations (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 155–8; Hutton, R., The Triumph of the Moon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 101–2; Parish (2005), pp. 147–9; Davies, O., Popular Magic: Cunning-folk in English History (London: Continuum, 2007), pp. 35–6; Shell, A., Oral Culture and Catholicism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 55–81. 27   Haigh, C., ‘The Recent Historiography of the English Reformation’, in Haigh (1987), pp. 19–33, at p. 25. 28   Purkiss (1996), p. 155. Walsham (2003), pp. 812–13 emphasizes the essentially missionary character of English Catholicism whilst cautioning against an excessive polarization of Counter-Reformation piety and traditional folk religion.

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encountered and reinforced one another, Latin charms need not be seen as specifically ‘Catholic’. At best, they were part of a ‘sub-Catholic’ culture that emerged in an early modern England no longer Catholic, but not yet recognisably Protestant. The role of ghosts in the early modern period has generated a great deal of interest in the last decade, and studies by Marshall, Davies, Sasha Handley and Shane McCorristine have touched on Catholic interpretations.29 There exists a large body of Shakespeare criticism on the ghost in Hamlet, beginning in the late nineteenth century and culminating in Stephen Greenblatt’s Hamlet in Purgatory (2001), which linked the play to Shakespeare’s supposed Catholic upbringing as well as wider Reformation debates concerning the return of the dead.30 Even before the ‘Catholic Shakespeare’ thesis became popular, May Yardley argued that critics needed to understand the Catholic point of view if they were to make sense of Elizabethan demonology.31 Alison Shell has highlighted the importance of ‘Catholic’ elements in sacrilege and ghost stories, which she argues originated in a Protestant anxiety concerning the effects of the Reformation; such stories were highly influential on Gothic fiction.32 Commentary on the picturesque ‘Catholic’ elements in Gothic fiction should not be confused with analysis of literature produced by Catholics themselves, and the validity of critical studies that treat Catholic alongside anti-Catholic literature is questionable.33 For Shell 29   Marshall (2002), pp. 236–64 (on Catholic attitudes); Maxwell-Stuart, P.G., Ghosts: A History of Phantoms, Ghouls and other Spirits of the Dead (Stroud: Tempus, 2006); Handley (2007); Davies, O., The Haunted: A Social History of Ghosts (Palgrave MacMillan: Basingstoke, 2007); McCorristine, S., Spectres of the Self: thinking about ghosts and ghost-seeing in England, 1750–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 30   See Spalding, T.A., Elizabethan Demonology (London: Chatto and Windus, 1880); Wilson, J.D., ‘Introduction: The Ghost Scenes of Hamlet in the Light of Elizabethan Spiritualism’, in Lavater, L. (eds J.D. Wilson and M. Yardley), Of Ghostes and Spirites Walking by Nyght (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1929), pp. vii–xxviii; Greenblatt, S., Hamlet in Purgatory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 195–9. 31   Yardley, M., ‘The Catholic Position in the Ghost Controversy of the Sixteenth Century’, in Lavater (1929), pp. 221–51. 32   Shell (2007), pp. 23–54. On the continued importance of ‘Catholic’ elements in Victorian gothic fiction, see O’Malley, R., Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 33   One recent example is Michael Tomko’s British Romanticism and the Catholic Question (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011), which discusses Elizabeth Inchbald’s attitude to superstition in A Simple Story (1791) alongside Wordsworth’s critique of Catholic superstition (pp. 52–86, 87–118). For general studies of anti-Catholicism see Haydon, C., Anti-Catholicism in EighteenthCentury England, c. 1714-80: A Political and Social Study (Manchester:

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and Michael Tomko, Catholicism constitutes a central theme in relation to which they consider both Catholic and anti-Catholic literature. By moving freely from an inner to an outer vantage point, they are able to illuminate the broad terrain of anti-Catholicism and Catholic responses but their primary focus inevitably remains on non-Catholic literature, whether antiCatholic or ‘Catholic’ in sympathy, simply because the literature produced by Catholics themselves was so meagre. A detailed study of English Catholic ghost-beliefs and narratives formed part of Marshall’s Beliefs and the Dead in Early Modern England (2002). However, Marshall’s study did not examine evidence from after the 1630s. Handley briefly addressed ghost stories and ghost beliefs in the eighteenth-century Catholic community, albeit her account was hampered by the mistaken assumption that Jacobites were always Catholics (and vice versa) and misconceptions concerning the nature of some of her Catholic sources.34 A unified study of Catholic ghost beliefs and ghost narratives across the entire period of the ‘penal years’ is wanting. No literature exists on Catholic responses to witchcraft in the early modern period. However, since Reginald Trevor-Davies’s attempt to link Catholicism with witchcraft accusations in 1947, there has been sustained academic discussion of the idea that witchcraft and Catholicism were linked in the popular imagination of Reformation England.35 Whilst Trevor-Davies, Norman Jones and Malcolm Gaskill argued that laws against witches were directly or indirectly aimed against Catholics, this view was opposed by Alan MacFarlane, Aveling and Elmer. The tendency to assume a link between Catholicism and witchcraft in early modern Manchester University Press, 1993); Shell, A., Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558-1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Alvarez-Recio, L., Fighting the Antichrist: A Cultural History of Anti-Catholicism in Tudor England (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2011). 34   Handley (2007), pp. 171–2. 35   Trevor-Davies, R., Four Centuries of Witch-Beliefs (London: Methuen, 1947), p. 21; MacFarlane, A., Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 188; Thomas (1991), p. 598; Aveling, J.C.H., ‘Catholic Households in Yorkshire, 1580–1603’, Northern History 10 (1980), pp. 83–101, at p. 95; Haigh, C., Reformation and Resistance in Tudor Lancashire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 322; Jones, N., ‘Defining Superstitions: Treasonous Catholics and the Act against Witchcraft of 1563’, in Carlton, C. et al. (eds), State, Sovereigns and Society in Early Modern England: Essays in Honour of A. J. Slavin (Stroud: Sutton, 1998), pp. 187–204; Purkiss (1996), pp. 155–9; Elmer, P., ‘Towards a politics of witchcraft in early modern England’ in Clark, S. (ed.), Languages of Witchcraft: Narrative, Ideology and Meaning in Early Modern Culture (Basingstoke and New York: Macmillan and St Martin’s Press, 2001), pp. 101–18; Gaskill, M., Witchfinders: A Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy (London: John Murray, 2005), pp. 80, 101.

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English culture derives from two sources. A cursory reading of antiCatholic polemic can give the impression that Catholics were thought of as witches, and the analysis of the witch-trials as an essentially antiCatholic phenomenon fits in with a functionalist view of the early modern obsession with witches as an aberrant outworking of the Reformation. However, there is no evidence that Catholics in England were ever accused of witchcraft (except in rhetorical fashion) and the belief that they were rests on a misinterpretation of anti-Catholic texts such as Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witches (1584) and Thomas Ady’s Candle in the Dark (1656), as well as confusion between witchcraft and sorcery. Missing from discussions concerning the motivation of witch-trials and witch-hunting has been any attempt to discover what English Catholics themselves thought about witchcraft. Stuart Clark’s Thinking with Demons (1997) considered Stapleton’s views, but did so only in the context of Continental Catholic approaches.36 Catholic attitudes to witchcraft have never been analysed in an English context, either because the Catholic community has been considered too marginal or because historians have assumed that the evidence is lacking. However, given the importance of ideas of witchcraft to early modern understandings of possession by evil spirits, which only puritans and Catholics claimed to be able to exorcise, it is puzzling that there has as yet been no study bringing together Catholicism and witchcraft. By examining texts on witchcraft produced in the Catholic community itself, this book seeks to establish the neglected Catholic responses as an integral part of the historiography of English witchcraft. The fact that anti-Catholic polemic was so loud in accusing Catholics of magic makes a study of the Catholic point of view all the more important if a balanced understanding of the relationship between Catholics and the supernatural is to be attained. Academic interest in English exorcisms is a relatively recent but currently flourishing phenomenon, beginning with D.P. Walker’s Unclean Spirits (1981).37 Walker was as much interested in the Continental evidence as the English. However, he provided the first serious treatment of episodes such as the ‘Witches of Warboys’, the exorcisms of the puritan John Darrell and the ‘Devils of Denham’ in their religious context. More recently Thomas Freeman, Marion Gibson and Andrew Cambers have treated the subject   Clark, S., Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), pp. 526–39. On the European dimension see also Baroja, J.C., ‘Witchcraft and Catholic Theology’ in Ankarloo, B. and Henningsen, G. (eds), Early Modern European Witchcraft: Centres and Peripheries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 19–43. 37   Walker, D.P., Unclean Spirits: Possession and Exorcism in France and England in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries (London: Scolar Press, 1981), especially pp. 43–9. 36

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of the contested legitimacy of exorcism within the Church of England,38 and Phillip Almond’s study of the texts of exorcism narratives has included a discussion of William Weston’s exorcisms and the ‘Boy of Bilson’.39 Almond emphasized the essential similarity of Catholic and Protestant exorcisms in spite of ‘confessional nuances’, as well as exorcism’s uncanny ability to cross confessional borders.40 The first dedicated study of Catholic exorcisms in England was produced by the Shakespeare scholar F.W. Brownlow in the context of a study of the origins of the devils in King Lear. Brownlow’s Shakespeare, Harsnett and the Devils of Denham (1993) examined William Weston’s exorcisms of 1585–86 in considerable detail.41 Davies has considered the relationship between Catholic exorcism and beliefs about bewitchment in the early nineteenth century, although his examination of Edward Peach’s 1815 exorcism did not consider the political and theological furore that it later caused.42 Walsham was the first historian to take seriously the missionary dimension of Catholic exorcisms. Whilst she argued in 2003 that exorcism was a form of miraculous healing, my article of 2009 emphasized the role played by traditional witchcraft beliefs in many Catholic exorcisms and the extent to which these were indulged by the Jesuits.43 In 2007, Nicky Hallett produced two important monographs on seventeenth-century English Carmelites drawn from her studies of convent annals. These contained several significant exorcism accounts that shed light not only on the role exorcism played within Carmelite spirituality but also on perceptions of the devil and witchcraft within the convent.44

  Freeman, T.S., ‘Demons, Deviance and Defiance: John Darrell and the Politics of Exorcism in Late Elizabethan England’, in Lake, P. and Questier, M. (eds), Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c. 1560–1660 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2000), pp. 34–63; Gibson, M., Possession, Puritanism and Print: Darrell, Harsnett, Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Exorcism Controversy (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2006); Cambers, A., ‘Demonic Possession, Literacy and “Superstition” in Early Modern England’, Past and Present 202 (2009), pp. 3–35. 39   Almond, P., Demonic Possession and Exorcism in Early Modern England: Contemporary Texts and the Cultural Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 331–57. 40   Almond (2004), p. 22. 41   Brownlow, F.W., Shakespeare, Harsnett and the Devils of Denham (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 1993). 42   Davies, O., Witchcraft, Magic and Culture 1736–1951 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 23–6. 43   Walsham (2003), pp. 779–815. 44   Hallett, N., Lives of Spirit: English Carmelite Self-Writing of the Early Modern Period (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007a), pp. 95–6; Hallett, N., Witchcraft, Exorcism and the Politics of Possession in a Seventeenth-Century Convent: ‘How 38

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Exorcism was the ultimate Catholic response to ghosts and witches, and it was the one spiritual service offered by the Catholic clergy (and sometimes the laity as well) that remained in demand even among nonCatholics well after the Act of Uniformity. Exorcism existed on an uneasy boundary between official Catholic practice and unofficial folk-magic, and by engaging in it the priest, in the eyes of both non-Catholics and some Catholics, took on the mantle of the magician. Furthermore, the promotion of the Catholic faith through exorcism was purchased at the price of compromising with existing local beliefs about magic and witchcraft. No study until now has examined the place of exorcism and ‘unbewitchment’ in the Catholic community beyond the end of the seventeenth century. Sources A study of the Catholic community’s response to ghosts, witchcraft and exorcism inevitably poses challenges related to the peculiar nature of that community as a secretive, persecuted minority. This book concentrates primarily on evidence produced by the Catholic community itself, rather than on Protestant commentary, and this is scarce in comparison with the voluminous accusations of anti-Catholic polemic. Until the second half of the eighteenth century, Catholic access to printing in England was very limited indeed, and many important works, such as the treatise on exorcism in Weston’s ‘miracle book’, circulated in manuscript only.45 Catholic books in English intended for the mission were printed abroad, primarily on the presses of the English College, Douai and the Jesuit College at St Omer, as well as in Paris, but these were a drop in the ocean compared to the outpouring of Protestant literature from the 1640s onwards.46 For this reason, it is occasionally necessary to rely on hostile testimony for evidence of Catholic beliefs and practices when sources of Catholic origin are unavailable, and when the hostile sources in question make very specific claims that it is impossible for the historian to ignore. Examples of such sources include Samuel Harsnett’s Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (1603), Richard Baddely’s Boy of Bilson (1622) and John Gee’s Foot out of the Snare (1624). Harsnett’s book was based on a thorough investigation carried out by the Archbishop of Canterbury Richard Bancroft Sister Ursula was once bewitched and Sister Margaret twice’ (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007b), pp. 1–38. 45   Harsnett, S., A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (London, 1603), p. 22. 46   See Allison and Rogers (1956); Clancy (1974); Blom, Blom, Korsten and Scott (1996).

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into Weston’s exorcisms. The investigators were aided by the testimony of one of the priests, Anthony Tyrell, a convert to the Church of England. It was in Tyrell’s interests to ensure that his intelligence on the priests was as accurate as possible. On the other hand, Harsnett was writing 15 years after the events themselves and this, combined with the author’s antiCatholic agenda, renders Harsnett’s Declaration an unreliable source at best for Weston’s actual practices. John Gee, like Tyrell, had been involved in the Catholic community and had probably been on the point of converting to Catholicism when he was apprehended in the ruins of a collapsed building at Blackfriars in which the Jesuit Robert Drury had been saying Vespers in October 1623.47 Ostensibly in gratitude for his miraculous escape, but more probably in order to save his own skin, Gee undertook to expose the supposed ghostfaking exploits of a group of London priests, both Jesuits and seculars. His inside knowledge allowed him to name the priests and give details of their movements, even if his claims of fraud are not particularly plausible. Richard Baddely generously allowed Catholics to speak for themselves by reprinting a pamphlet in support of an exorcism in Staffordshire, before attacking the exorcists as credulous and addicted to fraud in the main text. Whatever their defects, Harsnett, Gee and Baddely’s accounts were inspired by the real actions of Catholics that they chose to portray as frauds and charlatans, albeit the truth about the cases in question is now irrecoverable. Sources produced by Catholics themselves constitute the bulk of the evidence on which this book is based. These come in a variety of different forms, of which printed controversial works produced on the presses of the English colleges make up a significant proportion. Missionary reportage, consisting of such documents as the Jesuit annual letters (reproduced by Henry Foley in his Records of the English Province of the Society of Jesus) and the accounts of the persecution in England by Robert Parsons and Diego de Yepes, was replete with accounts of exorcisms conducted by Catholic priests, but for obvious reasons names and other particulars such as dates and locations were rarely included in these narratives. Much the same was true of missionary autobiographies such as those of John Gerard, William Weston and Bede Travers. Later church histories based on these sources, such as Richard Challoner’s Memoirs of Missionary Priests (1741), understandably suffered from the same defects. As well as excluding names and dates for security reasons, English Catholic accounts of supernatural occurrences may also have been presented in such a way as to portray a united, suffering community of Catholics. Walsham has argued that just because evidence of internal divisions within the community concerning supernatural phenomena has not survived, this   Harmsden, T., ‘Gee, John’ in DNB, vol. 21, p. 715.

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does not mean that they did not exist. Official reports probably edited out ‘troublesome episodes’, and ‘the silences of our sources may … be poignant ones, hiding heterodox tendencies that strained the image of heroic unity and purity that priests sought to paint of the community.’48 As the case of the visionary Elizabeth Orton demonstrated, promotion of supernatural tales as a proselytizing tool had its downside and could be turned against Catholics by Protestant polemicists. The potential of miraculous accounts to feed Protestant incredulity was the Achilles’ heel of the English CounterReformation. Thus, published Catholic martyrologies tended to present a cautious approach to the supernatural while manuscript accounts that circulated amongst the faithful were full of the miraculous.49 Gee made much of Catholic efforts to suppress embarrassing incidents. In 1616, two Catholic girls named Amy and Mary in the Gatehouse at Westminster began to claim that they were ‘possessed’ by various angels, saints and martyrs, ‘Yet when this was blowne abroad, and beganne to breed scandall unto the Catholick cause, one of the maides gave-over her pretended guest, and the other was secretly conveyed away.’50 The annals of religious orders such as the English Benedictines, the Carmelites of Lierre and the English Augustinian Canonesses at Louvain and Bruges are generally more revealing, since exiled communities had less to conceal than those working in England. However, different concerns affected the extent to which religious communities were prepared to record their experiences of the supernatural, such as the acceptability of their interpretations in the light of Counter-Reformation spirituality. Continental communities were under the religious discipline of the dioceses in which they were located, whereas the unclear ecclesiastical status of the English mission permitted innovation and experimentation of a kind not always possible in France and the Low Countries. Letters, diaries and manuscript treatises, along with literature produced by Catholics, are not significant sources before the end of the seventeenth century, when Catholics felt a little safer in committing themselves to writing. References to the supernatural are scarce in texts produced by English Catholics, who were primarily concerned either with combating heresy or with the immediate pastoral problems of the embattled community in England. For this reason, the interest of Catholic authors in the supernatural, when they did touch on the subject, should usually be seen as one component of a wider pastoral strategy. Exorcisms, ghosts, witchcraft and even miracles were not common subjects of discussion in the English   Walsham (2011), p. 283.   Ibid., pp. 283–4, 289, 287. 50   Gee, J., New Shreds of the Old Snare, containing the Apparitions of two 48 49

new Female Ghosts (London, 1624), pp. 54–5.

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church, and printed works by English authors were rarely devoted exclusively to the subject of supernatural phenomena. Until the eighteenth century, most of the literature was of clerical origin. Later, lay Catholics were prepared to discuss the supernatural in personal letters, allowing us a glimpse of the role supernatural narratives could have played in family networks. In a more tolerant age, Catholics had the confidence to articulate their beliefs, even if the views they expressed were self-consciously in contrast to prevailing Enlightenment ideals. By the dawn of the nineteenth century, discussion of the supernatural had become not merely acceptable but also fashionable, and some ghost stories of Catholic origin became the ‘talk of the town’ in Bath and London. Burgeoning Catholic periodicals provided an opportunity for the transmission of supernatural stories and commentary on them, while vigorous pamphlet wars were conducted between theological foes such as Joseph Berington and John Milner. Little or no evidence survives for the beliefs of ordinary Catholics of social status lower than the gentry, and the vast majority of the evidence considered here was produced by the clergy and lay elite. The silence of ‘plebeian’ Catholics, even into the nineteenth century, is a problem encountered by all historians of English Catholicism (and indeed all historians of the early modern period). The possibility that folklore might give a voice to plebeian Catholics is an attractive idea, but with the exception of some areas of the north of England where Catholic priests remained continuously active, Catholic missions were generally too ephemeral to make much of an impact on local folklore. Furthermore, the possibility that supposedly ‘Catholic’ folklore was either contaminated by or invented by romantic Victorians should always be borne in mind. Structure This study is primarily a social and intellectual history of the leaders of the Catholic community: priests, gentry patrons and the literate laity. However, in spite of efforts to unearth the contribution of plebeian and urban Catholics to the community before 1800,51 the fact remains that, at its lowest ebb, Catholicism in England was sustained by a high proportion of established gentry families, who provided mass centres and patronage to the clergy in the absence of a properly constituted ecclesiastical hierarchy. Recent historical studies have returned to the premise that English Catholicism can be studied most effectively through the influential

51   See, for instance, Rowlands, M.B. (ed.), English Catholics of Parish and Town 1558–1778 (London: CRS, 1999).

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families,52 and the painful transition from pre- to post-Emancipation Catholicism in the 1830s can be seen in terms of a struggle between the old family interests and a newly empowered clergy. The first chapter of this study examines English Catholic attitudes to the definition of superstition in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in contrast to Protestant views, and the contested status of supernatural phenomena such as miracles within the Catholic community. I shall argue that, in addition to those prepared to accept ‘signs and wonders’ at face value, a persistent strand of moderate scepticism existed within the Catholic community that had its roots in the secular clergy’s hostility to Jesuits engendered by the Archpriest Controversy. Catholic scepticism reached its apogee in the writings of Thomas White and Kenelm Digby in the midseventeenth century. Chapter 2 traces the development of this tradition into the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when scepticism took the form of a Jansenist rejection of Jesuit ‘means of grace’. Having undergone a poetic transformation in the Enlightenment humanism of Alexander Pope, the sceptical tradition achieved its final form in the writings of ‘Cisalpine’ Catholics, who rejected an uncritical attitude to the miraculous along with unquestioning obedience to the Papacy. The willingness of the Jesuit mission to England to rely on the miraculous ultimately produced or at least strengthened scepticism within the Catholic community, as political divisions played out in divergent views of what constituted superstition. Chapter 3 deals with Catholic attitudes to and encounters with ghosts, and addresses the question of whether Catholics really were preoccupied with proving the existence of purgatory, as Protestant polemicists claimed. Through an analysis of ghost narratives of Catholic origin, both from the Reformation period and the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, I assess the extent to which Catholics experienced and interpreted ghosts differently from their Protestant neighbours. The evidence suggests that, from the seventeenth century onwards, Catholic experiences of ghosts were barely distinguishable from those of other English people and rarely incorporated explicit doctrinal elements reinforcing distinctive beliefs such as purgatory and prayer for the dead. Where they did, the stories were intended to confirm the faith of wavering Catholics rather than convert Protestants; ghost narratives could play an important pastoral role within the Catholic community. 52   See, for instance, Questier, M., Catholicism and Community in Early Modern England: Politics, Aristocratic Patronage and Religion, c. 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Marshall and Scott (2009). My own forthcoming studies, The Gages of Hengrave and Suffolk Catholicism, 1640–1767 (London: CRS) and Rookwood Family Papers, 1606–1760 (Woodbridge: Suffolk Records Society, forthcoming) will make the same argument.

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The theme of Chapter 4 is the relationship between the Catholic community and witchcraft up to around 1685. This chapter deals with the important question of whether the growing fear of witchcraft in England from the 1560s onwards was in any way linked to anxiety concerning the presence of Catholic missionary priests. Through an analysis of the Samlesbury witch trial of 1612, I advance the argument that persecution of Catholics and witchcraft accusations were inversely proportionate. For political reasons, suspicions of Catholic involvement chased away suspicions of witchcraft. Seventeenth-century ‘anti-popery’ was primarily a movement against figures in the established church, and Catholics were less likely to be victims of witch-hunting than Laudian conformists in the 1640s. The attitudes of Catholics themselves towards witchcraft are also examined, as well as the extent to which the Jesuit mission continued to exploit witchcraft belief. Chapter 5 continues the treatment of Catholic attitudes to witchcraft into the ‘Age of Enlightenment’, from around 1685 until Catholic Emancipation. It considers the literary theme of the witch in Catholic literature and the impact of continuing witch-trials in France, as well as French scepticism, on Catholic attitudes. This chapter includes a detailed textual analysis of the only treatise on witchcraft by an English Catholic, Gregory Greenwood’s Three Discourses of Witches and Witchcraft. I argue that a passive belief in the reality of witchcraft continued to exist in the English Catholic community into the nineteenth century. However, the Catholic community’s status as a marginalized minority made it highly unlikely that accusations of witchcraft would arise within it, and unlike Methodists, Catholics never actively promoted belief in witchcraft. Chapter 6 considers the deployment of exorcism as a missionary tool by Catholics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and its representation in both Protestant and Catholic sources, charting the subsequently diminishing importance of dispossession in the eighteenth century and the political origins of the revival of exorcism in the early nineteenth. I argue that exorcism was an integral part of the Catholic missionary effort in England from 1585 to the 1670s. For the Jesuits in particular, exorcisms were a unique opportunity to demonstrate the power of the true faith since the laity (Catholic and non-Catholic) valued the supposed powers of Catholic priests. However, exorcists rarely used the official Roman rite of exorcism (1614) and preferred to rely on sacramentals such as the ‘water of St Ignatius’ and confessions of faith. Exorcists were called upon not only to deal with possessed persons but also haunted houses, arguably a distinctive creation of the Reformation period. The chapter examines the varied responses to exorcism within the Catholic community, which ranged from Edmund Bedingfield’s testimony of his dramatic exorcisms of Carmelite nuns to the sophisticated scepticism of Kenelm Digby.

IntroDUction

23

For the historian to pronounce on the ‘reality’ or ‘unreality’ of the supernatural phenomena that English Catholics believed they experienced, or dismissed as delusions, would be to import contemporary standards of rationality and belief into a context within which those same standards would not have been recognized. The nature of the evidence does not permit any assessments of this kind, and it is not for this study to venture into the realms of psychology and parapsychology. I have treated the interpretations of experiences presented by the Catholic sources as authentic, albeit frequently contested, expressions of Catholic attitudes. I subject the non-Catholic sources to greater critical scrutiny on account of their value as indications of what the actual beliefs and practices of Catholics may have been. Their anti-Catholic bias must be recognized in order for them to serve this purpose. I have endeavoured, as far as possible, to avoid ‘functionalizing’ Catholic attitudes to the supernatural. This is the danger of treating all Catholic responses to supernatural phenomena as expressions of something other than engagement with the supernatural.53 The supernatural, for most English Catholics for most of the period covered by this book, was entirely real, and therefore it is unreasonable to treat their beliefs as fulfilling a function other than what they themselves are likely to have thought it was. The psychological reality of an experience need not prevent it from fulfilling a social function, yet that social function does not exhaust the meaning of the experience. People who genuinely believed themselves to be possessed by evil spirits, for example, may also have consciously or subconsciously taken the opportunity afforded by possession to air their grievances against their social superiors. It does not follow from this that possession was nothing more than a mechanism for the self-expression of the disenfranchised. People who thought they were witches may also have had a desire for revenge against their employers and social superiors, but this does not justify the analysis of witchcraft in purely social terms. Both witchcraft and exorcism were powerful realities in their own right for the people who experienced them, rather than ciphers for other forms of subversion. Confessional identity and confessional assumptions had a profound effect on the way in which early modern English people perceived the events around them. In 1580, the visionary Elizabeth Orton ‘made a shew, both by gesture of bodie & wordes, uttered in suche lamentable 53   On functionalist interpretations of witchcraft, see Sanders, A., A Deed without a Name: the Witch in Society and History (Oxford: Berg, 1995), pp. 90–203; Stuart, P.J. and Strathern, A., Witchcraft, Sorcery, Rumors and Gossip (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 2–4. For a broader discussion of the problems of witchcraft historiography, see Briggs, R., ‘Many Reasons Why: Witchcraft and the Problem of Multiple Explanations’ in Barry, Hester and Roberts (1996), pp. 49–64.

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wise, that al the lookers on were fully perswaded, this tender girle to indure unspeakeable tormentes, the space of one houre and more’.54 The context of Elizabeth’s ‘torments’ as part of a series of visions convinced the Catholic bystanders that she was experiencing the pains of purgatory when her convulsions might have been interpreted in another context as evidence of possession. However, the fact that Elizabeth’s visions had advanced the Catholic cause encouraged Protestants to expose her as a fraud rather than portraying her as a demoniac. For a modern observer to offer yet another interpretation of what happened is to enter into the same process of advancing a cause through a human experience, a fruitless effort based on pitting one interpretation against another. The historian approaching contested phenomena of this kind must make a conscious decision to treat one point of view as the reality that was then perceived, rather than offering his or her own perspective. By restricting the subjectmatter of this book to reality as perceived by early modern Catholics, I limit its scope but, I trust, enable meaningful historical engagement with the evidence.

54   Rich, B., The True Report of a late Practise enterprised by a Papist (London, 1582).

CHAPTER 1

Early Modern Catholics and ‘Superstition’ The history of English Catholic responses to the supernatural – whether the supernatural is understood to include miracles, visions, ghosts, witchcraft, demonology, or exorcism – has shadowed the political and theological history of the Catholic community. As Ian Bostridge observed of the literature on witchcraft, ‘Witchcraft theory shadows developments in theology. The holy and the demonic move in step.’1 Confessional attitudes towards the boundaries of the supernatural and preternatural, of right religion and harmful superstition, are governed and influenced by theological and philosophical developments. To a remarkable degree, political divisions within English Catholicism found expression in divergent attitudes to the supernatural. These differences of opinion were sometimes the result of far-reaching disagreement about the philosophical and theological grounds of Catholic belief; on other occasions, they were politically motivated and had more to do with the ways in which Catholics chose to relate to the intellectual culture around them. Either way, the case for studying English Catholic responses to the supernatural as a lens through which the neuroses and internal dynamics of the community are laid bare is a compelling one. Perhaps the most striking result that emerges from such a study, given the contrary impression given in virtually all anti-Catholic literature of the period, is the sustained survival of a distinctively Catholic tradition of measured scepticism concerning supernatural phenomena across three centuries. This tradition never enjoyed an uncontested dominance within the Catholic community. However, its circumspect approach to the relationship between faith and philosophy, religion and science has arguably stood the test of time to a greater extent than the unconstrained scepticism of some Protestant authors and the ire of its authoritarian critics within the Catholic community. The fact that the Catholic voice of caution was frequently marginalized within a marginalized community did not prevent its long-term survival and it should not prevent its contemporary exposure to academic scrutiny. 1

  Bostridge (1997), p. 51.

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Supernaturalism, ‘Superstition’ and the Roots of Scepticism For educated mediaeval and Counter-Reformation Catholics, the word ‘supernatural’ did not mean what it does to most people today. The supernatural denoted God and the activity of his grace, and the word ‘preternatural’ was applied to the activity of spirits other than God. Counter-Reformation authors sought to make this distinction, which already existed in Scholastic philosophy, a clear one that was understood by everyone. The Spanish Jesuit Martin Del Rio consistently made use of the word ‘preternatural’ to describe the workings of magicians in his influential Disquisitiones Magicae (1595). The category of ‘preternatural effects’ which worked beyond the normal bounds of nature ranged from the activity of the devil and the demonic operations of magicians to the morally neutral powers of the human soul. Del Rio himself confessed that the human imagination had bizarre properties and could affect the formation of an embryo in the womb.2 Likewise, the spirits of the dead appearing from purgatory were holy, not evil. The preternatural included the activities of all spiritual agents other than God and his immediate servants, the angels.3 The disembodied souls of the dead, demons and the devil himself, as well as the powers of the living human soul all fell into this category. Counter-Reformation defences of the Catholic church against Protestant accusations of superstition produced ‘the most vigorous language and the most obviously original elaborations of the tradition’,4 in which phenomena thoughtlessly accepted in the mediaeval world were rigorously rationalized. By the end of the sixteenth century, Catholics were consistently portrayed as superstitious in Protestant propaganda, distinguished by their acceptance of the miraculous and the preternatural in addition to the revelation of Scripture. This rendered them idolatrous and potential allies of the devil. However, this dichotomy of Protestant and Catholic disguised two important facts: first, that many Protestants were as much preoccupied with the supernatural as their Catholic counterparts, and secondly, that Counter-Reformation Catholics had their own careful definitions of superstition. The suppression of the ‘radical Reformation’ in Continental Europe, the influence of the ‘cessationist’ theology of John Calvin, who argued that miracles ceased around the time of the death of the   Del Rio, M. (trans. P.G. Maxwell-Stuart), Investigations into Magic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 42–4. 3   The role of angels in post-Reformation English Catholicism has recently been examined by Alexandra Walsham, ‘Catholic Reformation and the Cult of Angels in Post-Reformation England’, in Raymond, J. (ed.), Conversations with Angels (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011), pp. 273–94. 4   Cameron (2010), p. 228. 2

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last apostle, and the installation of Protestantism as the faith of the political establishment in England all led to the progressive official downgrading of the supernatural in sixteenth-century England. However, as the case of the exorcist John Darrell was to demonstrate, interest in the supernatural remained very much alive in some sections of the Protestant community. Euan Cameron has argued that the Counter-Reformation attitude to ‘superstition’ consisted of two main imperatives: to purge, purify and homogenize rites, and to defend the value of rites that were officially approved by the church.5 These imperatives had the potential to come into conflict (if someone believed that an officially approved rite was being misused, for example), but in practice the two arguments were normally deployed in different pastoral contexts. In a mission territory, maintaining the value of the rites themselves was more important than it was in a Catholic country, where fighting abuses was of paramount importance. So successful was the equation of Catholicism with superstition by Elizabethan propagandists that it is easy to forget that, when Catholicism was the established religion, the relationship between Protestantism and superstition was reversed in Catholic propaganda. In his official defence of the Marian burnings, The Displaying of the Protestants (1556), Miles Hogarde attacked the Protestants for their superstition. He mocked gospellers who condemned relics ‘in their bookes’, yet flocked to the fires of Smithfield to gather up the bones of their ‘pseudomartyrs’.6 In particular, he singled out the credulity of some spectators at the burning of John Rogers in 1555:7 … divers marchaunt men and others, which seing certayne pigions flying over the fire that haunted to a house harde adioyninge, beyng amased with the smoke forsooke their nestes, and flew over the fire, were not ashamed boldely to affirme that that the same was the holy ghoste in the lykenes of a dove … Then by the lyke argument they might have sayde that crowes which the same time hovered over the fyre, were devels. But what blasphemy is this, such opinionative fooles to beleeve or credite such fansies? The Heathen poetes never devysed more toyes upon Iupiter, Diana, Actaeon, Io, or suche other counterfaites, then the madbraynes of the protestantes have invented tales upon these Ethnikes.

In Hogarde’s view, the Protestants were guilty not only of credulity but also of imposture, convincing the unlearned to believe in feigned miracles. Hogarde wrote not as an embattled defender of the Catholic cause but in   Ibid., pp. 23–4.   Hogarde, M., The Displaying of the Protestants (London, 1556), p. 64v. 7   Ibid. pp. 64v–5v. 5 6

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the belief that the Marian restoration was a permanent return to normality, and Protestantism no more lasting than previous heresies. Eamon Duffy has recently drawn attention to the sober ‘orthodox’ martyrology of Marian Catholicism in Nicholas Harpsfield’s never published Life and Death of Sir Thomas Moore,8 which stood in stark contrast to the popular, outlandish Catholic martyrologies of the Elizabethan and Stuart periods. Alexandra Walsham has demonstrated that clerical versions of these martyrologies ‘meticulously censored sensational details which might provoke a fresh wave of scoffing Protestant attacks on “popish credulity”’, and continued a humanist tradition of hagiography into the penal era.9 Even after their exile to the Continent, Nicholas Harpsfield and Thomas Stapleton mocked John Foxe for claiming the same miracles for his ‘martyrs’ as Protestants refused to concede to Catholic saints.10 In the preface to his translation of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History (1565), Stapleton systematically demonstrated the inconsistency of the Protestant position. They were unwilling to believe the documented miracles of the saints, and yet they believed in miracles wrought by Protestant martyrs on mere hearsay:11 If it seme incredible that the bodyes of dead men may remaine uncorrupted and sounde, why is it tolde for a miracle that the hart off Zwinglius was found whole in the ashes, all the rest of the body being burned up? If visions appearing to some, not to al that are present seme fabulous, let it be a fable (as in dede it is, being thereof eye witnesse my selfe) that he telleth of Latimers hart bloud, when he suffred in Oxford. Iff the Crosse of saint Oswalde seme a superstitious tale, how much more fonde and fabulous is the tale of one that suffred at Bramford, with a greate white crosse, appearing in his brest?

The miracles reported by Bede, Stapleton argued, were far more trustworthy than those reported by ‘upstert sectaries’. Catholic and Protestant scepticism shared a common origin in the Renaissance humanist dislike for corruptions in hagiographies, but this original unity of critical purpose was obscured by the polemical use to which scepticism was put by Protestant authors determined to tar all Catholics with the same brush. Denominational slurs of this kind often went unanswered, but there was one notable exception to this in a printed controversy that occurred between the Protestant James Calfhill and the Catholic John Martiall in   Duffy (2009), pp. 182–6.   Walsham (2003), p. 790. 10   Parish, H.L., Monks, Miracles and Magic: Reformation Representations of 8 9

the Medieval Church (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 158–9. 11   Bede (trans. T. Stapleton), The History of the Church of Englande (Antwerp, 1565), p. 9v.

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1565–66. This was initiated by the publication of Martiall’s Treatyse of the Crosse (1565), an attack on Protestant iconoclasm against crosses and crucifixes and a defence of Catholic practices such as signing with the cross. Calfhill replied with An Aunswere to the Treatise of the Crosse (1565) in which he claimed that the sign of the cross was ‘daily used’ in witchcraft and conjuration,12 and sought to demonstrate that there were no grounds for it in Scripture or tradition. Martiall replied with a detailed rebuttal of Calfhill’s arguments, A Replie to M. Calfhills Blasphemous Answer made against the Treatise of the Crosse (1566). He compared Calfhill with Julian the Apostate, but declined to refute his allegation that the sign of the cross was superstitious. Instead, he accused Calfhill of improper zeal. Even if it were true that the sign of the cross was superstitious, ‘Was it fitting for such a sincere professour of the Ghospell, such an experte father in the scriptures … as yow pretend yower selfe to be, so to revile and raile at it?’ Calfhill had failed to heed the warnings of Scripture not to curse the devil, and had thereby fallen unwittingly into blasphemy.13 Even if someone did abuse the sign of the cross in witchcraft, Martiall argued, Calfhill was not justified in claiming that the sign of the cross itself was a form of enchantment: ‘a thing good of it selfe, shoulde not be sclandered or taken awaye for the abuse of the fewe.’14 Martiall’s argument was typical of the Counter-Reformation, in so far as he acknowledged abuses of sacramentals whilst denying that they were, in their essence, superstitious. Furthermore, he was concerned to establish their validity on scriptural and patristic authority rather than mere common usage.15 Martiall countered Calfhill’s accusation that miracles after the age of the Apostles were the work of the devil and witchcraft with a reductio ad absurdum: if sorcerers can imitate the wonders of the Gospel so closely, how can we be certain that Christ himself was not a sorcerer? The answer, according to Martiall, is that we must accept the word of our elders in the face of universal doubt.16 Scepticism was an argument in favour of tradition and therefore Catholicism; the less human ingenuity was able to find out for itself, the stronger the argument that we should rely on the tried and tested ways. Scepticism thus gave birth to fideism; the less we can know for ourselves, the more we ought to rely on faith.

12

  Calfhill, J., An Aunswere to the Treatise of the Crosse (London, 1565),

p. 338.

    15   16   13 14

Martiall (1566), p. 25v. Ibid. p. 25r. On the Calfhill-Martiall controversy, see Cameron (2010), pp. 207–10. Martiall (1566), pp. 182v–3r.

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The Marian Catholic establishment accused Protestants of credulity and the Elizabethan Protestant establishment levelled the same accusation against Catholics. This may demonstrate that the charge of superstition was always a useful one to level against one’s doctrinal foes or, alternatively, that religious minorities in Reformation England were attracted to miracles and ‘special providences’ as a form of validation for their marginalized cause. Walsham has argued that ‘providentialism’ was a mindset adopted by victor and vanquished, Catholic and Protestant alike. Catholics ‘were as skilled in this form of rhetorical warfare’ as Protestants, and ‘Crudely polemical providentialism was … as much a part of the cultural heritage and patrimony of Roman Catholics as of Protestants.’17 A tit-for-tat war over the interpretation of ‘providences’ was initiated by a pamphlet written by the Catholic John Morwen, an ejected prebendary of St Paul’s, concerning the lightning strike that burnt part of the cathedral in 1561.18 The providential deaths of persecutors was a particularly popular theme of Catholic literature and the manuscript accounts of martyrdoms collected by Christopher Grene and later used by Richard Challoner in his Memoirs of Missionary Priests (1741) were full of ‘anti-Protestant obituaries’.19 Although direct mention of the devil was absent from these stories, they were little different from mediaeval and Protestant tales in which the devil acted as ‘God’s hangman’, visiting physical retribution on sinners. In contrast to Walsham, Euan Cameron has suggested that to some Counter-Reformation authors, steeped in late mediaeval tradition, providence did not matter so much as the correct use of ritual.20 However, the evidence from England suggests that, partly in response to the use of providence by Protestants, Catholics became skilful interpreters of events. It is too simplistic to view Catholicism and Protestantism in terms of their contrasting attitudes to what constituted superstition. As the European Counter-Reformation progressed, Catholic tolerance of traditional ‘superstitions’ was increasingly contested from within by theologians. Martin Del Rio provided the classic Counter-Reformation definition of superstition, as a piety that ‘indulges in superfluities and is thus corrupted’.21 Superstition was, in other words, a misdirected piety or an excess of religion focused not upon God but upon physical objects or practices. This might be an intentional instrumentalization of sacred rites for one’s own ends, as happened in the case of ritual magicians, or an ignorant folk-belief. For     19   20   21   17

Walsham (1999), pp. 238, 241. Ibid., p. 233. Ibid., pp. 239–40. Cameron (2010), p. 224. Del Rio (2000 [1595]), p. 31. On the Counter-Reformation’s demarcation of superstition and piety see also Davies (2007), pp. 170–71. 18

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instance, Del Rio condemned ‘the credulousness and superstitious behaviour of certain Catholics who ascribe supernatural power to things which have not been consecrated’.22 On the other hand, Del Rio affirmed the power of consecration by legitimate ministers of the church; the definition of superstition was at least partly a means of ensuring the church’s monopoly on spiritual aid. The Catholic church used the accusation of superstition against members of the laity who pretended to assume clerical powers.23 A distinctive aspect of Catholic Reformation polemic was a concern to maintain the importance of using specific words in the sacraments, whilst refuting the Protestant accusation that this rendered the sacraments a form of magic. In 1566, Thomas Heskyns condemned those who ‘accounted it sorcerie and supersticion to be bownde to a certain forme of woordes in the ministracion … of [the] sacraments’, since by so doing they insinuated that the words spoken by Christ himself were demonic.24 The Catholic convert William Rainolds (c. 1544–94), in his reply to the Scottish Calvinist Robert Bruce’s Sermons upon the Sacrament (1590), turned the accusation of magic back on the Protestants. Mocking the Protestant insistence on making a sermon part of every sacrament, including baptism, he noted that ‘this indeed were very magical[,] not preaching, but inchauntement, to preach to the infant, who understandeth never a word.’25 Rainolds refuted the accusation of magicalism in the sacraments on the grounds that the valid ordination of the priest and the intention with which he said the words of consecration or baptism, rather than the actual words themselves, made the sacrament effective: ‘There is no more power or vertue in them, then in any other words, or sillables, or sentences of the Gospel.’26 Counter-Reformation Catholics, stung by the accusations of the Reformers, were keen to demonstrate both that the church’s supernatural claims were real and that the church had the supernatural under control. Sarah Ferber has argued that the closeness of the activities of the priest to those of the witch, especially in rural areas where the clergy were sometimes poorly educated, was a matter of continuing concern to the

  Del Rio (2000 [1595]), p. 116.   Davies and De Blécourt (2004), p. 4. 24   Heskyns, T., The Parliament of Chryste avouching and declaring the 22 23

enacted and receaved Trueth of the Presence of his Body and Blood in the Blessed Sacrament (Antwerp, 1566), p. 176v. 25   Rainolds, W., A Treatise concerning the true Catholike and Apostolike Faith of the Holy Sacrifice and Sacrament (Antwerp, 1593), p. 218. Rainolds claimed that the Scottish Protestant exiles in Geneva were enthusiastic students of magic and witchcraft (p. 339). 26   Ibid., pp. 339–40.

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Counter-Reformation church in early modern France.27 As Shell put it, ‘The Catholic church’s continued endorsement of miracles made it all the more important for apologists to maximize the distance between real and spurious supernaturalism.’ Tridentine Catholics, and especially the clergy, did not always feel at ease with traditional practices and, especially in a Protestant country, ‘they must constantly have been embarrassed by having belief in popular superstitions imputed to them.’28 William Allen denied that it was his role to defend ‘every peculiar mannes phantasy’.29 In Walsham’s view, it was disagreement over publicizing the miracles wrought by the Elizabethan martyrs and their relics that began to sow the seeds of conflict between those ‘who shied away from sensational supernaturalism for fear of scandal’ and those Counter-Reformation enthusiasts who believed that the church should publicize and use anything ‘that testified to the ongoing ability of the Catholic Church to work astonishing wonders’. The debate concerning the value of the supernatural mirrored the Archpriest Controversy of 1598–1602, during which ‘Appellants’ among the secular clergy protested against the Pope’s appointment of the pro-Jesuit George Blackwell and affirmed their willingness to take an oath of allegiance to the Queen. A priest’s decision whether to take the oath or not, like his decision whether to promote exorcisms and miracles, ‘revolved around the problem of balancing prudence with proselytising zeal’.30 The antagonism between the seculars and regulars (that is, Jesuits) engendered by the Archpriest Controversy and the Gunpowder Plot, for which many seculars blamed the Jesuits, was the real cause of a division in the Catholic community that, in one form or another, existed until well into the nineteenth century. On the one hand, the Jesuits and their ultramontane successors believed that the Catholic faith would overcome error by virtue of the power of its truth, and that an uncompromising path of promoting the faith should be followed, even if that led to martyrdom. These Catholics saw loyalty to the Pope as intrinsic to Catholic identity. On the other hand, Catholics in the political tradition of the Appellants asked for the right to practise their faith but regarded it as a private matter, and had less interest in converting non-Catholics than in acting in such a way as to gain their respect as loyal subjects. These Catholics were attracted to Blackloism, Anglo-Gallicanism and Jansenism in the seventeenth and Cisalpinism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, all of which were ideologies that qualified Papal supremacy. 27   Ferber, S., Demonic Possession and Exorcism in Early Modern France (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 63. 28   Shell (2007), p. 79. 29   Allen (1565), p. 115r. 30   Walsham (2003), p. 811.

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Catholic and Sub-Catholic The phenomenon of ‘Catholic survivalism’ in Reformation England, meaning the continued existence of apparently ‘Catholic’ rites and practices in popular religion after the Elizabethan Settlement of 1559, has long been of interest to historians as potential evidence of the slow progress of reform and the lingering appeal of Catholicism. However, the term ‘sub-Catholic survivalism’ is preferable, since ‘Catholic survivalism’ contains the implicit assumption that these practices bore an uncomplicated relationship to postReformation Catholicism. This is the very question at issue; survivalism has been at the centre of a historiographical debate concerning the extent of continuity between the English Catholic community before and after the Reformation. The first generation of revisionist Catholic historians, including Bossy and Aveling, argued that an entirely new form of Catholicism was effectively created by the seminary priests and Jesuits from the 1570s onwards,31 while more recently Haigh and Walsham have argued for a more balanced approach that sees Reformation Catholicism as a layered combination of pre-Reformation foundations overlaid with Counter-Reformation devotions and practices. One reason for the long-running nature of this debate is surely the nature of the evidence for Catholicism itself. Whilst Haigh primarily concerned himself with evidence of popular religion from the north of England, Bossy concentrated on the much richer evidence produced by the Catholic elite, which portrayed a reformed religion distant from the Middle Ages. I do not intend to resolve the historiographical debate here (if it can ever be resolved), but it is important that its implications for the status of the supernatural in the Catholic community are recognized. When self-conscious Catholics such as popish recusants avowed belief in the supernatural, did this derive primarily from Counter-Reformation Catholicism, or were their beliefs part of a vestigial pre-Reformation popular religion shared by Catholics and non-Catholics alike? Sub-Catholic practices included the use of Latin words or fragments of the liturgy in charms and prayers, rush-bearing, the ringing of bells to drive off storms, customs connected with childbirth and the addition of ‘popish’ words, actions, or ceremonies to reformed rites. These practices sometimes came to the notice of the courts; at other times they were recorded by concerned Protestant commentators. The term ‘Catholic survivalism’ can be misleading, since it suggests that those who deployed ‘Catholic’ practices considered themselves Catholics. There is little evidence that they did, and none to suggest that those who were brought before the courts for superstitious practices were also presented for recusancy. The   Bossy (1979), p. 11.

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de-Catholicization of the English people moved more quickly than their Protestantization,32 leaving gaps in theological understanding and pastoral care that were often filled until the second half of the seventeenth century by a popular religion that, perhaps inevitably, drew its inspiration from half-remembered fragments of pre-Reformation Catholicism. On the other hand, even in the absence of evidence that this was so, it is almost certain that Catholics were as likely as anyone else to value and credit the quasimagical prescriptions of popular religion, and Walsham has argued that the importation of Continental devotions and spirituality would have done nothing to dampen this.33 In an important essay on the continuity of English Catholicism in the Reformation period, Haigh argued that ‘Separated English Catholicism, with its important church-papist penumbra, was not a new post-Reformation creation of missionaries from the Continent; it was a continuation of traditional English Catholicism shaped by the circumstances of the Reformation in England.’34 However, Haigh also acknowledged that, whilst the ‘deepest foundations’ of Reformation Catholicism were mediaeval, the ‘immediate foundations’ of Catholicism lay in the Marian Counter-Reformation. As Duffy and Lucy Wooding have convincingly shown, the Marian church was a radically Counter-Reformation institution rather than a continuation of mediaeval institutions.35 Thus the import of Haigh’s argument is different today from what it might have been in 1987, when the Marian regime’s continuity with the Henrician dispensation was largely accepted. In the context of recent historiography, to associate ‘separated Catholicism’ with the Marian revival is to place it squarely at the heart of the Counter-Reformation. Haigh recognized that within the ‘conservative cultural framework’ of their society, Catholics were not a segregated group with a clearly defined membership. Catholicism was ‘a varied and amorphous phenomenon’ and people drifted in and out of recusancy. People’s religious practice and customs cannot be regarded as an indication of their religious allegiance, since the aspects of ‘traditional English Catholicism’ that continued to 32   Oldridge, D., The Devil in Tudor and Stuart England, 3rd edn (Stroud: History Press, 2010), p. 113. 33   Walsham, A., ‘Domme Preachers’? Post-Reformation English Catholicism and the Culture of Print’, Past and Present 168 (2000), pp. 72–123, at p. 121. 34   Haigh, C., ‘The Continuity of Catholicism in the English Reformation’ in Haigh (1987), pp. 176–208, at p. 207. 35   Wooding, L.E.C., Rethinking Catholicism in Marian England (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000); Duffy (2009). For an alternative view see Loades, D., ‘The English Church during the Reign of Queen Mary’, in Edwards, J. and Truman, R. (eds), Reforming Catholicism in the England of Mary Tudor: The Achievement of Friar Bartolomé Carranza (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 33–48.

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be embraced by Catholics were also embraced by worshippers in parish churches.36 Haigh recognized that the miracles at Holywell and the increasing prominence of exorcism were new elements to provincial Catholicism, but saw them in terms of what had gone before rather than as innovations. Walsham, following Haigh, has criticized the ‘presumed polarity’ between Catholicism as survivalism and Catholicism as a missionary religion.37 However, she has observed that the itinerant missions deployed by seculars and regulars in order to renew the fervour of isolated communities were in advance of similar developments on the Continent by almost a century.38 A historiography that sees everything in the early modern world as an expression of religious conflict has led some to assume that beliefs essentially unrelated to Catholicism were an expression of religious survival. Regina Buccola has analysed the association between Catholicism and fairy belief in anti-Catholic literature and reached the conclusion, on little or no evidence, that Catholics themselves endorsed this connection: ‘The continued practice or promulgation of fairy belief kept Catholic doctrines alive under another (and a not specifically religious) guise.’ Catholicism, unlike Protestantism, ‘offered the theological space for constructs such as the fairyland linked purgatory and not quite angelic, not quite demonic spirits such as the fairies’.39 Buccola even goes so far as to suggest that the prominence of fairies in Shakespeare’s rural plays represents a ‘mischievous dance with Catholicism’ that would be the natural result of Shakespeare’s being a Catholic.40 Behind Buccola’s analysis lies the groundless and puzzling assumption that Catholics would want to associate themselves with pre-Christian figures of superstition such as the fairies, when quite the opposite is likely to have been the case. It may well be true that the ‘relaxed, peasant Catholicism of the [Lancashire] dales’ was more typical of pre-Civil War Catholicism than ‘the piety of John Gerald’s reformed households’.41 Unfortunately, however, the evidence we have is primarily of a self-consciously missionary Catholicism that defined itself not only against Protestantism but also against the complacent and materialistic piety of the Middle Ages. Missionary clergy were determined to assert the continuity of what they styled ‘the Old Faith’ by encouraging pre-Reformation practices such as     38   39   36

Haigh (1987), p. 206. Walsham (2003), p. 813. Ibid., p. 812. Buccola, R., Fairies, Fractious Women, and the Old Faith: Fairy Lore in Early Modern British Drama and Culture (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 2006), p. 35. 40   Ibid. pp. 25–7. 41   Haigh (1987), p. 207. 37

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the pilgrimage to Holywell in an austere, Counter-Reformation form. Yet it is undeniable that, at times, missionary Catholicism came face to face with sub-Catholic survivalism, especially in Lancashire. If there was any truth in the accusation that the missionary priest Christopher Southworth encouraged young Grace Sowerbutts to accuse her grandmother and aunt of witchcraft because they attended church (see Chapter 4 below),42 then Southworth was partly exploiting pre-existing folk beliefs to achieve a pure ‘recusant’ Catholicism unsullied by occasional conformity – an ironic case of ‘popular religion’ serving the aims of the Counter-Reformation. Rather than rejecting the ‘magical’ features of pre-Reformation religion, missionary clergy ‘fuelled the desire of the laity for contact with the sacred’ in a spirit of ‘negotiation and creative compromise’.43 In view of the evidence presented by the Jesuit Annual Letters, to be examined in Chapters 4 and 6 below, this is an understatement, and in the mid-seventeenth century, the Jesuits were no longer so much ‘compromising’ with existing folk-beliefs as presenting sacramentals and consecrated objects to local people as an alternative to the services offered by cunning-folk. However, missionary priests were rarely exalted figures of learning who deigned to compromise with vulgar superstition. More often than not, they were sons of the local gentry and it was not uncommon for them to minister close to their own friends and relatives. This was one major difference between England and other ‘mission territories’, where the culture and people were alien to those engaged in the missionary process. Priests were set apart from their communities by learning and celibacy, but they were still part of them. Walsham has argued that the extraordinary miracles attributed to the Elizabethan martyrs and their relics, as outlandish as anything to be found in mediaeval saints’ lives, together with missionary priests’ reliance on miraculous healings and exorcisms,44 demonstrates that pre- and postReformation religion were not polar opposites. Pre- and post-Reformation religion were equally receptive to the supernatural. However, it does not follow that because missionary clergy embraced some aspects of folk religion, followers of that folk religion were, or were more likely to be, Catholics. Unless it can be demonstrated that there was a link between an individual who deployed sub-Catholic words and practices and the Catholic community itself, it is safer to assume that that person was no more a Catholic than anyone else in England after 1559. Keith Thomas’s view that the use of Latin by the unlearned laity was a sure indication of the presence of Catholicism led him to assume that 42   Potts, T., The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster (London, 1613). 43   Walsham (2003), pp. 780–81. 44   Ibid., p. 790.

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the Essex witch Agnes Waterhouse, tried in 1566, was a Catholic.45 Diane Purkiss has argued convincingly that use of Latin cannot be taken as an indication of confessional identity.46 However, even Purkiss’s view that Latin spells and charms were sub-Catholic survivals is not entirely secure. Numerous traditional tales of exorcism testify to the extent to which ceremonies in Latin were desirable when ‘laying’ ghosts. If an exorcist was able to address a spirit in an even more exotic tongue, such as Syriac or Arabic (‘the language of the alchemists’), then his power was deemed even greater.47 In the West Country, the view that only a clergyman trained at Oxford could perform an effective exorcism was a common one.48 A Catholic priest was no more likely to know Syriac or Arabic than a clergyman of the established church, and he would certainly not be an Oxford man. These two requirements of the exorcist suggest that it was primarily learning (of which Latin was a mark), not the residual power of Catholic ritual, that was sought after and admired by ordinary people. The popular preoccupation with the occult power of learning was exploited by cunning-folk, who decorated their houses with books,49 and it was not uncommon for seventeenth-century cunning-folk to claim to have learnt their art from a learned practitioner with knowledge of Latin and Greek; the astrologer William Lilly was a particularly popular choice.50 The significance of Latin lay primarily in the magical power of a language understood only by the select few, rather than in its associations with a Catholic era that, by the 1620s, was largely forgotten. Furthermore, Latin was far from alien to the Protestant clergy, since it was the principal language of instruction in the universities. Ironically, it was the sceptic Reginald Scot, who included the texts of numerous spells in his Discoverie of Witchcraft, who ensured that Latin was associated with elite ritual magic. By the 1660s, the ceremonies employed by John Rudall, curate of Launceston in Cornwall, to exorcise spirits resembled magical conjurations more than Catholic rituals.51

  Thomas (1991), p. 592.   Purkiss (1996), pp. 156–7. 47   Hole, C., English Folklore (London: Batsford, 1940), p. 164; Brown, T., 45 46

‘Some Examples of Post Reformation Folklore in Devon’, Folklore 72 (1971), pp. 388–99, at p. 390. 48   Brown, T., The Fate of the Dead: A Study in Folk-Eschatology in the West Country after the Reformation (Ipswich: Folklore Society, 1979), pp. 48–9. 49   Hutton (2001), p. 90. 50   Davies, O., Popular Magic: Cunning-folk in English History (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2007), pp. 72–3. 51   Hole (1940), pp. 162–4.

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‘Catholic survivals’ must be treated with great caution. Whilst the amorphous nature of the early Catholic community cannot be denied, the Catholic community cannot be meaningfully studied over any length of time unless Catholics are regarded as, in some sense, a self-selecting group. By the 1570s, adherence to Catholic beliefs, ritual forms and pre-Reformation traditions was not sufficient to identify a person as a Catholic. Self-conscious Catholics, whether recusants or church papists, were obliged to participate in a world of clandestine mission of which their neighbours were not a part, however much they may have hankered after the certainties of the pre-Reformation world. Mystical Recusancy In much the same way in which embattled English Protestants reached out for the miraculous under the Marian regime, some Elizabethan Catholics eschewed the cautious scepticism of Harpsfield, Allen and Stapleton and chose to draw on the esoteric strand within learned pre-Reformation Catholicism. The obsession of Sir Thomas Tresham (1543–1605) with numerology and secrecy is one example of this; during his second period of imprisonment in the Bishop’s Palace at Ely in 1590, supernatural events began the train of thought that led ultimately to the building of a triangular warrener’s lodge on his estate at Rushton in Northamptonshire (1593–97), proclaiming his faith in the Trinity through cryptic symbolism.52 Tresham observed that whenever the recusant gentlemen imprisoned at Ely attempted to paint their chambers with Catholic symbolism it was washed off by the gaolers, whereas secular and armorial devices were untouched. Tresham had the idea of encoding Catholic symbolism in emblems ‘tending to highest poyncts in divinitye, trynite &c. both forth of scripture and the fathers, also some poyntes forth of historye, musike, geometrye and arithmatikk, fordermore using latyn, greeke and hebrewe, in all which to bee skylfull ytt sorteth not with the greatest number’. Tresham, who is now widely accepted as the author of the theological Brudenell Manuscripts,53 was a ‘Renaissance man’ of prodigious learning. He drew upon the Christianized Cabala of Johannes Reuchlin, incorporating the numerical value of the ‘pentagrammaton’ JHSUH into the length of the   British Library Add. MS 39831, fols 5–12, partially edited in Salisbury MSS, vol. 14, pp. 90–91. On the Triangular Lodge, see Girouard, M., Rushton Triangular Lodge (London: English Heritage, 2004). 53   Kilroy, G., Edmund Campion: Memory and Transcription (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 13–14; Eburne, A., ‘The Passion of Sir Thomas Tresham: New Light on the Gardens and Lodge at Lyveden’, Garden History 36 (2008), p. 117. 52

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perimeter walk at Lyveden,54 and noted that the emblems he drew at Ely were ‘now perfectly in my memory’, suggesting his emblem system was an example of the art of ‘artificial memory’ used by some practitioners for magical purposes.55 He omitted to describe in detail ‘those [emblems] that depend uppon geometricall and arythmeticall relations’, perhaps for the reason that an excessive knowledge of mathematics and geometry was associated with astrology and sorcery. Tresham attached great significance to the number 25, ‘a quadrate number of Jesus as of Maria’, and noted that both the Feasts of the Annunciation (25 March) and Nativity both fell on a Friday in 1597. His mysticism also rendered him highly sensitive to possible signs of divine favour: I usually having my servauntes (hear allowed mee) to reed nightly ane hower to mee after supper, yt fortuned that fulcyss my then servant reedynge in the Christian Resolution in the treatise of proof that ther is a god &c., ther was uppon a weynscott table att that instant three lowde knokkes (as yf yt hade been with ane yron hammer) geven to the great amazing of me and my 2 servantes fulcyss and hilkton.

Tresham interpreted the incident of the three knocks as a sign that his ‘labor … in the trynitye and passion of Christe’ received divine approval, and it is likely that it was the immediate stimulus for his commemoration of the Trinity in the form of the Triangular Lodge. John Dee, apparently a firm Protestant even in Mary’s reign, was nevertheless prepared to draw upon recent Catholic mystical tradition for his operative magic. Stephen Clucas has argued that Dee, who was already practising astrology in the reign of Queen Mary, drew on the argument of the martyred Bishop of Rochester, John Fisher, that virtually any prayer grounded in humility will be accepted by God. Dee made frequent use of prayers for wisdom from Fisher’s Psalmi seu Precationes, and even the angels in Dee’s scrying sessions referred to the psalms of ‘Roffensis’.56 Dee chose to interpret Fisher’s insistence on humility as the single requirement for effective prayer as a licence to instrumentalize prayer, and placed great emphasis on putting himself into a humble state of mind before angelic 54   Eburne (2008), p. 129. On Christian Cabalism see Yates, F., The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (London: Routledge, 1979), pp. 23–7. 55   On the art of ‘artificial memory’ in the Renaissance and its uses, see Yates, F., The Art of Memory (London: Routledge, 1966). 56   Fisher, J., Tractatus de necessitate orandi, quoted in Clucas, S., ‘John Dee’s Angelic Conversations and the Ars Notoria: Renaissance Magic and Mediaeval Theurgy’, in Clucas (ed.), John Dee: Interdisciplinary Studies in English Renaissance Thought (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006), pp. 231–74, at pp. 248–55.

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conferences. Whether or not Dee’s use of Fisher shows that he was ‘nostalgic for lost elements of Catholic devotions’,57 it certainly demonstrates that a man who explored the outermost boundaries of Renaissance Neoplatonism drew on an English Catholic mystical tradition. However, Dee was self-consciously Protestant, and his use of Fisher is evidence of his openness to the fullness of the Renaissance tradition rather than nostalgia or engagement with Catholicism. English Catholics and the Devil Nathan Johnstone and Darren Oldridge have argued in recent studies that a distinctly ‘Protestant’ conception of the devil emerged in Reformation England that emphasized the devil’s insidious role as an internal tempter, in contrast to the cruder and more physical representations of the Middle Ages.58 For Protestants, all supernatural activity that was not the work of God was the work of the devil. For cessationist Calvinists, all supernatural activity, except the work of grace in the soul, had to be attributed to the devil. Predestinarians believed that the devil had sovereignty over everyone except the godly elect, and in the absence of any certain remedy against the devil’s machinations, he became an increasingly terrifying and fearful figure for English Protestants. Paradoxically, however, the ubiquity of the devil in every mundane temptation could diminish his supernatural status. A kind of ‘demonological psychology’ took the place of mediaeval tales of a grossly physical devil who worked wonders and dragged sinners to hell, and as a consequence, belief in the devil’s reality became a matter of faith. English Catholics experienced some of the same conditions as the godly, such as a sense of persecution and isolation. One reason Oldridge has suggested for the transformation of the devil in early modern England was the ‘intensely introspective and personal style of devotion’ that emerged as part of Reformation piety.59 This introspective piety was a feature of Counter-Reformation Catholicism as well as puritanism; Jeffrey Burton Russell associated it especially with Ignatian spirituality.60

  Clucas, S., ‘False Illuding Spirits & Cownterfeiting Deuills: John Dee’s Angelic Conversations and Religious Anxiety’ in Raymond, J. (ed.), Conversations with Angels (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011), pp. 150–74, at p. 168. 58   See Johnstone, N., The Devil and Demonism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Library, 2006), p. 75; Oldridge (2010), p. 50. 59   Oldridge (2010), p. 48. 60   Russell, J.B., Mephistopheles: the Devil in the Modern World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 31. 57

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Russell’s suggestion that Counter-Reformation culture encouraged ‘a sense of the insidious influence of the Devil’61 was certainly borne out by the testimony of the English Carmelites at Lierre, for whom every temptation to sin or even the thought of sin was personified as a named devil.62 Johnstone has drawn attention to the emphasis on temptation in Continental Catholic works that circulated in translation in the English Catholic community by authors such as Jean-Pierre Camus, John Castaniza and Robert Bellarmine. Walsham has noted that ‘a trend towards introspective and quasi-mystical devotion’ within sixteenthcentury English Catholicism showed that a ‘renewal from within’ was in progress.63 At the same time, however, the lives of the saints continued to emphasize the devil’s physical power and tendency to manifest himself when internal temptation failed.64 In many Counter-Reformation convents and monasteries, the mediaeval emphasis on sanctification through perfect community life was replaced by a preoccupation with the purging of individual sin and the idea of attaining a mystical union with God. In the convent at Lierre, the devil was active in a very physical way indeed, attacking the Prioress until she was ‘black & blue with blows’.65 Diabolic physical violence played an important part of in the life of St Teresa of Avila and it seems to have been accepted as part of Carmelite life. In 1628, Anne More, who had married a Protestant and been forced to conform outwardly, was inspired to join the English Augustinian Canonesses at Louvain after she witnessed the devil raise a tempest and strike down three people in Wells Cathedral during a sermon in which the preacher denounced the Virgin Mary as ‘a saffron bag’.66 Yet physical attacks were merely the outward signs of the devil’s much more insidious and deadly attacks on the soul by means of temptation. Temptation could easily become ‘obsession’, in which the devil literally ‘laid siege’ to the soul, often as a prelude to bodily possession. Ironically, however, the more physical the devil became, the less likely he was to succeed. Possession was his last resort and could enhance the sufferer’s reputation for holiness. There is no shortage of references to the devil in English Catholic polemic – Stephen Gardiner made some of the earliest efforts to argue that Protestants were servants of the devil in the 1540s.67 In 1554, Thomas Watson preached before Queen Mary that, by taking away the Blessed     63   64   65   66   67   61 62

Johnstone (2006), p. 82. Hallett (2007b), pp. 92–106. Walsham (2011), pp. 288–9. Johnstone (2006), pp. 82–3. Hallett (2007b), p. 135. Hamilton (1904), vol. 2, p. 60. Johnstone (2006), pp. 33–4.

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Sacrament, the Protestants deliberately intended ‘to leave us naked and unarmed against the devyll’.68 In 1566, John Martiall mocked the Protestant argument that miracles were done by the devil in response to the prayers of the Catholic faithful in order to confirm them in error: ‘That were straunge, that God should forsake the godlie, and the divell healpe, Christe not heare whe[n] we call, as he promised, and the divel be readie to heare, and do good, before we call.’69 Humphrey Leech saw Protestantism as a demonic conspiracy and argued that it amounted to devil worship.70 The secular priest Oliver Almond developed this idea in his attack on Lutheran and Calvinist teachings on the devil. In The Uncasing of Heresie (1623), he rehearsed the customary allegation that Protestants were antinomians. Almond argued that, by their emphasis on the devil as the executioner of God’s providential judgements, Protestants made God responsible for all of the evil done by the devil and therefore refashioned God in the devil’s image. Almond satirized Protestant confidence in faith in Christ alone when he imagined a Protestant addressing the devil:71 Sir divel, thy threats and terrours moove me nothing, because there is one which is called IESUS CHRIST, in whom I beleeve, he hath abrogated the Law, & is thy Sathan ô Sathan; ô Law if thou canst accuse me, binde me, terrifie me, I wil place over thee an other Law, that is to say, an other tyrant & tormentor, who shall in like maner accuse, bind, & oppresse thee, thou art in deed my Hangman, but I have an other Hangman Christ, who shal tortour thee, by him I am free. If the divell beate me, I have a stronger divel, who shal in like maner whip him; Christ is my divel.

Almond’s argument was that Protestantism came perilously close to dualism; by acknowledging that the world was completely in the devil’s power, they set up a cosmic battle between Christ and the devil that had to be fought in the soul of every Christian. Catholics, by contrast, could trust in the church, who drew grace from Christ’s victory over the devil, without having to re-enact the drama in their own souls. Furthermore, Protestant confidence in facing the devil stemmed from their faith in a counterfeit Christ who was merely a devil himself. Almond concluded that ‘[Protestants] make God the author and producer of all sinnes, but we   Ibid. p. 84.   Martiall (1566), p. 182. 70   Leech, H., Dutifull and Respectfull Considerations upon foure severall 68 69

Heads of Proofe and Triall in Matters of Religion (St Omer, 1609), p. 6. 71   Almond, O., The Uncasing of Heresie, or, The Anatomie of Protestancie (Louvain, 1623), pp. 37–8.

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know not this God, but doe constantly affirme, that the divel is the author, moover, forcer, and producer of al sinnes and iniustice, therefore the god, whom the Calvinists adore and invocate is the divel.’72 The theologian Thomas Stapleton took a more nuanced view, admitting that God had granted the devil a great deal of power ‘in this our age’, as was shown by the growth of heresy and witchcraft, but he affirmed ‘the victory of Christians concerning demons’.73 Denial of the devil’s role as ‘God’s hangman’ was closely linked to Catholic opposition to the doctrine of predestination. Predestination undermined demonic as well as human free will, since the trials appointed by God to be inflicted by the devil on the elect and reprobate alike were predetermined from all eternity. If the devil did not have free will, Catholics argued, then he forfeited his role as an explanation for the existence of evil. The Catholic devil was both freer than the Protestant devil and yet less powerful. Because he acted in opposition to God rather than on God’s behalf, Catholics believed that the power of God could be invoked effectively against the devil. The most striking portrayal of the devil in seventeenth-century English literature, in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, had its Catholic parallel in a Latin epic in the style of Virgil composed by Robert Clarke (d. 1675), a Carthusian monk and former Professor of Poetry at the English College, Douai. Indeed, Clarke’s Christias (published in 1670, but composed around 1650) seems to have been a deliberate Catholic riposte to Milton.74 Clarke portrayed a devil burning with jealousy and rage against Eve’s prelapsarian innocence:75 Meanwhile from the fire-spewing caves of rapid Phlegethon, raising his burning head, hairy with twisted snakes, Lucifer was indignant at his lost honours and the serene orbs of the star-bearing vault of heaven. And while he was unable to bear himself, he was reminded by his pain of the causes of his downfall, and turned over in his mind his unalterable exile. He caught sight of the nymph

    74   75   72

Ibid., p. 71. Stapleton, T., Opera omnia quae extant (Paris, 1620), vol. 2, p. 503. Money, D.K., ‘Clarke [formerly Graine], Robert’ in DNB, vol. 11, p. 907. Clarke, R. (ed. A.C. Walthierer), Christiados libri xvii (Ingolstadt, 1855[1670]), p. 8 (Bk I, ll. 261–73). Patricia Brückmann has argued that Alexander Pope intended the encounter between Belinda and Ariel in The Rape of the Lock to resemble the encounter between Eve and Satan in Paradise Lost. If Pope was as much immersed in Catholic literature as Brückmann argues, however, the possibility that Clarke’s poem was as much an influence as Milton’s ought to be considered (Brückmann, P.C., ‘Virgins visited by Angel Powers: The Rape of the Lock, Platonick Love, Sylphs and some Mysticks’, in Rousseau, G.S. and Rogers, P. (eds), The Enduring Legacy: Alexander Pope Tercentenary Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 3–20, at p. 18). 73

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[that is, Eve] in the rosy valleys of the divine garden, without her husband, catching at the breezes and her wandering eyes running over every branch, and lusted after her. The pain and anger grew at his first sight of the virgin. The flames of Cocytus, less than the flame of his fury, numbed the savage heat of his insane breast, and his fire ignited with that touch paper.

In spite of the length of his poem, Clarke devoted far less space to sulphure faedo Lucifer (‘Lucifer filthy with sulphur’)76 than did Milton; the cosmic drama of good and evil came second to the life of Christ. However, just as Milton’s insertion of Lucifer into epic led to the refashioning of the devil as a charismatic literary character, so Clarke’s Lucifer was not so much an immanent spiritual threat as a literary creation who inhabited a classical hell, full of Virgilian and Homeric allusions. Lucifer’s association with fire and caves recalls Cacus, the antagonist of Hercules in Aeneid VIII, while his head ‘hairy with twisted snakes’ resembles Medusa. Transposed into epic, the devil of Clarke and Milton was both grander and less frightening than the devil who menaced and possessed individuals elsewhere in the seventeenth-century world. Milton and Clarke inadvertently opened the way for the devil to be seen primarily as a symbolic embodiment of human evil. The Christias soon fell into obscurity as neo-Latin literature declined in popularity, but it was nevertheless an impressive achievement of the English Catholic imagination. In D.K. Money’s view, the poem can stand comparison, ‘in its wide scope and vigorous execution’, with Milton. It is certainly comparable in its treatment of the devil. Catholic Aristotelianism and Scepticism of the Supernatural Philosophical presuppositions about the nature of reality are a crucial yet frequently overlooked component in the response of individuals and societies to the supernatural. Throughout the early modern period and beyond, learned English Catholics were distinguished from their Protestant countrymen not only by their religious beliefs but also by their philosophical education. English Catholic philosophy was part of a wider European late Scholasticism that endeavoured to take account of scientific discoveries whilst at the same time holding fast to what were considered essential Aristotelian tenets. Burton Russell associated ‘a revived systematic realism’ with the Counter-Reformation, a pattern of thought that had the virtue of preserving the wisdom of the Middle Ages but also the shortcoming of rigidity in the face of new ideas.77

  Clarke (1855 [1670]), p. 53 (Bk III, l. 101).   Russell (1986), p. 50.

76 77

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However, the Reformation divide cannot be mapped simplistically onto an opposition between Catholic Aristotelianism and Protestant Platonism. The Renaissance Humanist revival of both Plato and Aristotle, with a renewed emphasis on returning to the original texts, predated the Reformation. Thomas More, a figure who would become an important symbol to post-Reformation Catholics, was part of that movement.78 Aristotelianism remained an essential part of the statutory curricula of Oxford and Cambridge throughout the Reformation period, albeit periodically threatened and attenuated, and there were Protestant as well as Catholic Aristotelians.79 Furthermore, it cannot be assumed that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Aristotelians were backward-looking and conservative. The Italians Pietro Pomponazzi (1462–1535) and Lucilio Vanini (1585–1619), returning to a ‘purified’ Aristotelianism, concluded that there were neither ghosts nor spirits.80 A resurgence of interest in the original teachings of Aristotle, as opposed to Scholastic glosses, exposed the paradox of the Catholic church’s endorsement of a philosopher whose views on the survival of the soul after death were at best obscure and at worst entirely at odds with the Christian faith. Aristotelians, accepting the principle of a ‘universal system’ of knowledge based on the evidence of the senses, were more open to aspects of mechanism than other philosophers with a vitalist conception of the universe as a living entity. By 1600, ‘Aristotelianism’ was often an open and eclectic philosophy that incorporated insights from the prisca theologia (‘ancient theology’) of the Hermetic Corpus and recognized the validity of ‘occult’ sciences such as alchemy and astrology.81 It is undeniable that in England certain aspects of mediaeval Aristotelianism, especially the subtlety of Scotist systematic theology, were associated with the Catholic past. However, the ‘peripatetic synthesis’ remained the only viable framework for a universal system of knowledge until the 1640s,82 and the training of English Catholics in Tridentine seminaries differed only in detail from an Oxford education. ‘Aristotelianism’ varied from college to college and from master to master. A reading of the most infamous of witch-hunting manuals, the Dominican 78   Schmitt, C.B., John Case and Aristotelianism in Renaissance England (Kingston Ont.: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1983), pp. 17–18. 79   Ibid., pp. 19–20. On Aristotelianism in sixteenth-century Oxford, see also Yates, F., ‘Giordano Bruno’s Conflict with Oxford’, in Yates, Lull and Bruno (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), vol. 1, pp. 134–50, at pp. 134–8. 80   Clark, S., ‘The Reformation of the Eyes: Apparitions and Optics in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe’, The Journal of Religious History 27 (2003), pp. 143–60, at p. 150. 81   Schmitt (1983), p. 48. 82   Ibid. p. 28.

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Sprenger and Kramer’s Malleus Maleficarum, led Burton Russell to conclude that the European witch-craze ‘was encouraged by Aristotelian scholars as a defence against the competing ideas of magic and science’.83 This view stereotypes Catholic Aristotelianism; the Malleus employed one kind of debased Thomism to explain everything from incubi and succubi to the witches’ flight to the Sabbath,84 with a credulity that would probably have appalled Aquinas himself, let alone Aristotle. Thomas Stapleton still swallowed the argument of the Malleus whole at the end of the sixteenth century.85 However, witch belief was not confined to Aristotelian scholars and there were Catholic Aristotelians who had little time for the supernatural altogether. In England, it was Protestants, often contemptuous of Aristotelian metaphysics, who led the witch-hunting. Scholars with Catholic sympathies remained in England in Elizabeth’s reign and made important contributions to the revival of Aristotelian philosophy from the 1570s onwards. John Case (c. 1540–1600), who taught Logic at Oxford and was the most renowned English Aristotelian of his era, was ‘always Catholic at heart’ according to John Pits, and ‘persuaded many to become Catholics’ before dying in communion with the church assisted by a priest named ‘A.T.’.86 Charles Schmitt, in his study of Case, downplayed the evidence of crypto-Catholicism and emphasized Case’s connections with Protestant figures,87 but more recently E.A. Malone has favoured the idea that Case was a crypto-Catholic.88 He certainly corresponded with key Catholic intellectuals such as Sir Thomas Tresham.89 Perhaps because he was a religious conservative, Case kept to the doctrinally uncontroversial aspects of Aristotelian philosophy for most of his life. Eventually he produced a commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, Lapis Philosophicus (Philosophical Stone) (1599) that inevitably touched upon contested issues. The second part of Case’s Lapis (completed in 1597) dealt with the definition of nature and therefore confronted the question of what should be considered supernatural or preternatural. Case adopted a generally sceptical stance, attacking natural magic and ‘that chymistry, which has returned meagre fortunes to many wretched men’, arguing that ‘chymistry does not make [gold] by itself and without the virtue of nature.’ Case   Russell (1986), p. 30.   Sprenger, J. and Kramer, H. (trans. M. Summers), Malleus Maleficarum

83 84

(London: Folio Society, 1968), pp. 63–81. 85   Stapleton (1620), vol. 2, pp. 502–8. 86   Pits, J., Relationum Historicarum de Rebus Anglicis (Paris, 1619), p. 800. 87   Schmitt (1983), p. 114. 88   Malone, E.A., ‘Case, John’ in DNB, vol. 10, pp. 467–69. 89   Schmitt (1983), p. 103.

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conceded that alchemy might purify gold, but denied ‘that gold may come into being by that art alone. For there is always something natural beneath which is fixed upon by this art; salt, sulphur, mercury, the elements of the chymists.’ Even practitioners of demonic magic ‘alter the sky or air by the help of demons, and not without subjecting natural things’.90 The art of natural magic by amulets ‘being deficient in many things, however, by itself and by its own force, in the absence of nature, does nothing’. Case’s targets were the Paracelsans, vitalists who claimed that prediction, certainty and the differentiation of the living from the non-living were impossible because the universe itself was alive. Case dismissed Paracelsan claims that a homunculus could be generated by alchemy (‘which is a horrible saying’) on the grounds that ‘it is certain that the form of art cannot bring about natural motion, but the potency of nature lying within.’ By showing that ‘the principles, elements and effects’ of magic were natural, even if the means were not, Case established a fundamental distinction between the living and the non-living. Magicians’ need to invoke demons merely confirmed that magical effects were ultimately natural: If songs, words, herbs, amulets, images and sculpted idols of the figures of the stars have any power on account of demonic deception, they have it from nature, and indeed from many hidden influences and dispositions of the stars, and by the motion of natural things, or from a natural power of demons, who on account of long experience and use of things, still retain after the fall a spiritual essence and understanding.

Case acknowledged that ‘there is power in words, there is power in images, there is power in mixed medicines and amulets, to move, to change and to help nature’, insisting that even Aristotle accepted this. However, he declined to discuss judicial astrology, ‘secret magic concerning the raising of demons’, love magic, raising and calming storms, and ‘doing great marvels’, ‘lest it seem that I act superstitiously in this case’.91 This is a clear indication that Case was aware that he was straying into potentially controversial territory. Nevertheless, as Schmitt has pointed out, Case’s estimation of the potential of natural magic did exceed Aristotle’s;92 Case thereby anticipated the ‘Aristotelian mechanism’ of the Catholic philosophers Kenelm Digby and Thomas White. Furthermore, like Digby,

90   Case, J., Lapis Philosophicus (Oxford, 1599), pp. 177–8. For a detailed discussion of Case’s view of alchemy, see Schmitt (1983), pp. 202–16. 91   Case (1599), p. 179. 92   Schmitt (1983), p. 196.

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Case was enthusiastic about the potential of ‘occult’ cures and amulets in medicine but sought to explain them in natural terms.93 The issue that was to dominate English Catholic philosophy, as well as non-Catholic philosophy, in the seventeenth century was not the status of the occult sciences but life after death. During the Commonwealth period (1649–60), ‘mortalism’, the view that the soul did not survive death, was adopted by some religious sects on account of their particular reading of the Bible. At the same period, the Catholic philosopher Thomas White advanced radical views on life after death that originated in his reading of Aristotle. White’s views were essentially unrelated to the ‘mortalist controversy’ within Protestant theology and should be seen within the context of a long-running Scholastic argument concerning the ‘powers of the soul’. The powers (intellect, will, imagination and the senses), derived from Aristotle’s De Anima (‘On the Soul’), gave the soul agency, and without them the soul was essentially inert. Thus the soul differed from ‘separated substances’, spirits that were ontologically complete and capable of agency without bodies (such as angels).94 Fernando Cervantes has drawn attention to the failure of neo-Thomist thinkers of the Counter-Reformation such as the Jesuit Francisco Suárez (1548–1617), deeply influenced by centuries of Franciscan criticism of Aquinas, to embrace Aquinas’s conception of the human person as a union of body and soul.95 This led to the disintegration of Thomist epistemology, which regarded human beings as essentially embodied beings whose knowledge depended on their external senses.96 An important question among Scholastics was whether, once the soul left the body, it retained its powers or lost them. The separated soul, although immortal, was not fully human and did not become so until the resurrection of the body at the end of time. Aristotelian nominalists claimed that the soul and its powers were one, which implied that the soul retained its powers once separated from the body. Thomists held that the soul was distinct from its powers and that these powers depended, at least 93 94

  Ibid., p. 201.   For the original Thomistic doctrine of the difference between a human soul

and a separated substance, see St Thomas Aquinas (trans. J.F. Andersen), Summa Contra Gentiles Book Two: Creation (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), pp. 308–42, especially pp. 322–3, ‘That the separate substance and the soul are not of the same species’. 95   Suárezian Aristotelianism had a direct link with England through the person of John Salkeld (1579/80–1660), the English-born Jesuit who apparently assisted Suárez at Seville. Salkeld became a Protestant in 1612 and produced a hostile attack on Suárez’s angelology, A Treatise of Angels (London, 1613). 96   Cervantes, F., ‘The Devil’s Encounter with America’ in Barry, J., Hester, M. and Roberts, G. (eds), Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe: Studies in Culture and Belief (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 119–44, at pp. 132–3.

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in part, on the continued union between soul and body. Thus the soul was ‘insulated from immediate efficacy in the world’.97 By the middle of the sixteenth century, modified Thomism dominated Counter-Reformation philosophy, largely on account of the Jesuits’ decision to adopt it as the order’s semi-official philosophy. Suárez acknowledged that the soul separated from its powers would not be a thinking being, since one of the powers of the soul is thinking.98 Although Suárez argued that such a situation was impossible without God’s special intervention, it remained a theoretical possibility. The late Scholastic conception of the soul separated from the body and its powers was so limited that considerable potential for radical scepticism lurked within it. It was a small step from saying that the soul stripped of its powers was inert to the heresy of mortalism. The appearance of mortalism in the 1650s led in turn to a resurgence of interest in spirits, and therefore ghosts, amongst supporters of the Church of England.99 Jo Bath and John Newton have argued that, in England, Neoplatonic and Paracelsan views on spirits had broken the earlier Protestant consensus on the demonic origin of ghosts by the 1660s.100 There is no evidence that Catholics adopted the Neoplatonism of the likes of Henry More; instead, radical Catholics were radical Aristotelians, as might be expected given their education. Of these, the most prominent were Kenelm Digby, Thomas White and John Sergeant. Sir Kenelm Digby (1603–65), son of the Gunpowder Plotter Sir Everard Digby, was a polymath, courtier, alchemist and privateer who spent much of his early life as a church papist. He was educated at home by Jesuits before studying at Gloucester Hall, Oxford, a haven for Catholics since it had no chapel. Here, the formative influence on Digby was the cryptoCatholic mathematician, astrologer and manuscript collector Thomas Allen (c. 1540–1632). In 1635, Digby was reconciled to the church in Paris. Significantly, given his later involvement with Blackloism, Digby viewed Catholicism as a more tolerant religion than Protestantism since a greater diversity of theological opinion was acceptable within it.101 In Paris, Digby came into contact with Thomas White, Marin Mersenne and   Des Chene, D., Life’s Form: Late Aristotelian Conceptions of the Soul (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), p. 146. 98   Suárez, F., ‘De Anima’ in Opera (Lyons, 1621), vol. 3, p. 582. 99   Ibid. p. 7. 100   Bath, J. and Newton, J., ‘“Sensible Proof of Spirits”: Ghost Belief during the Later Seventeenth Century’, Folklore 117 (2006), pp. 1–14, at p. 1. 101   Milton, A., Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 234. 97

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Thomas Hobbes. As Chancellor of the Court of Queen Henrietta Maria at St Germain-en-Laye, he published his Two Treatises in 1644, which constituted his most important contribution to European philosophy. Digby’s active involvement in the life of the English church began in 1647 when he presented a plan by Henry Holden, a doctor of the Sorbonne, for toleration of Catholics by Parliament in exchange for an oath of obedience and abjuration of Papal authority.102 Digby’s philosophical contribution mirrored that of his friend Thomas White (1592/3–1676), who outshone Digby in his philosophical sophistication but whose reputation was tarnished by his attempt to argue that Catholics should recognize Cromwell’s government. Nevertheless, it was White’s alias, ‘Thomas Blacklo’, that lent its name to the ‘Blackloist’ philosophy that Digby and White created together in an atmosphere of mutual admiration.103 White had a lifelong commitment to the compatibility of religion and rationalistic science and he cultivated friendships with many of the future founders of the Royal Society. Whilst White may have aimed initially to gain toleration for Catholics by developing a reformed Catholic theology reconcilable with English Protestant thought,104 he went far beyond this agenda and produced an original philosophical position combining elements of mechanism with late Scholasticism. Beverley Southgate has argued that anti-scepticism was the overriding philosophical concern of the Blackloists. Digby and White were determined to prove that certain knowledge was possible in philosophy and theology, whilst accommodating the insights of the new ‘mechanical’ philosophy. Blackloism was particularly associated with the English College in Lisbon, of which White was the second president. White’s disciple John Sergeant (1623–1707) was Prefect of Studies there until 1655. After 1655, White came to dominate the chapter of the English secular clergy in London which, following the death of the Vicar Apostolic Richard Smith, claimed to exercise episcopal jurisdiction.105 For a brief period up to the Restoration, White was arguably not only the intellectual but also the political and ecclesiastical leader of the English Catholic community. Yet

102   Foster, M., ‘Digby, Sir Kenelm’ in DNB, vol. 16, pp. 152–8. On Digby as a Blackloist, see Kamil, N., Fortress of the Soul: violence, metaphysics and material life in the Huguenots’ new world, 1517–1751 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), pp. 489–90. 103   Southgate in Krook (1993), p. 4. 104   Almond, P.C., Heaven and Hell in Enlightenment England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 70–72. 105   Southgate, B., ‘Covetous of Truth’: The Life and Work of Thomas White, 1593–1676 (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993), p. 40.

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at the Restoration, hated by Protestants and Catholics alike, he was forced to flee to the Netherlands in fear of his life. White was a self-conscious Aristotelian throughout his life. At the English College in Lisbon from 1630–33, he instituted a curriculum of philosophical studies based solely on the texts of Aristotle;106 in this way he differed from many late Scholastic contemporaries who relied simply upon epitomes. According to his Jesuit critic Robert Pugh, White taught ‘rigid Thomistry’ in this period.107 However, White became increasingly concerned that the ‘primitive realism’ of his Thomist contemporaries misrepresented Aristotle, and part of the Blackloist project was to attain a purified Aristotelianism. White was excited, rather than threatened, by new scientific discoveries, but he firmly believed that the ‘mechanical philosophy’ had to be built on foundations of epistemological certainty, and these could only be provided by Aristotle. ‘Probable opinion’ was, for White, an insufficient basis for scientific truth. An essential component of Blackloism was its methodological insistence on a Scholastic model of disputation.108 In his scientific views, White embraced atomism and nominalism and denied Aquinas’s formulation of the doctrine of transubstantiation. His materialist reductivism extended to the explanation of ‘occult’ phenomena such as magnetism in atomistic terms. He argued that an ‘effluvia’ of tiny invisible particles streaming from one surface to another caused magnetic attraction, and claimed that a ‘sphere of influence’ existed around all living things, constituted by the effluvia of their atoms. Perception was, according to White, a form of touch; we perceive an object only when its effluvia touch our sphere of influence.109 Consequently, there can be no absolute error in perception, only errors of interpretation. White repudiated Cartesian mind-body dualism and maintained the Aristotelian orthodoxy that the soul is the form of the body, albeit a body construed in wholly mechanistic terms.110 White’s atomistic endeavours to explain phenomena that those of a more Neoplatonic cast of mind regarded as ‘occult’ and mysterious were reminiscent of Leibniz’s attempt to rationalize the bodies of angels as ‘composed of an infinity of tiny flying creatures’.111 The philosophical tendency of late Scholastic thinkers such as White and Leibniz, trained   Southgate (1993), pp. 26–7.   Pugh, R., Blacklo’s Cabal Discovered in Severall of their Letters (London,

106 107

1680), ‘Epistle to the Catholick Reader’. 108   Southgate (1993), p. 79. 109   Ibid., pp. 70–71. 110   Ibid., pp. 208–13 On White’s metaphysics, see pp. 111–21. 111   Leibniz, G.W. (trans. and eds P. Remnant and J. Bennett), New Essays on Human Understanding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 220.

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within a realist metaphysics that they were not prepared to forsake, was towards materialism rather than mysticism. This is most clearly seen in the contrast between Digby’s presentation of his famous ‘powder of sympathy’ and Jan Baptista van Helmont’s De Magnetica Vulnerum Curatione (‘On the Magnetic Cure of Wounds’) (1621).112 Van Helmont and Digby, both Catholics, both proposed an occult cure based on the Paracelsan ‘weapon salve’. However, whereas Van Helmont presented the cure in terms of ‘chemical philosophy’, drawing on a vitalist conception of the ‘world soul’, and insulted the Jesuits in the course of his argument, Digby’s explanation of the cure in terms of atoms and effluvia was wholly materialistic. For White, the mind’s perception of these effluvia could explain apparently ‘occult’ phenomena such as predictive dreams.113 The difference between Van Helmont’s Hermeticism or Neoplatonism and Digby’s materialist Aristotelianism may go some way towards explaining why Van Helmont suffered persecution from the ecclesiastical authorities. The powerful emphasis on causality within White’s philosophy had the consequence that, although he did not deny the existence of miracles, White was anxious to limit the miraculous and, wherever possible, advance physical explanations of Biblical prodigies. A universe where anything could happen was unacceptable to White, who defended the belief of another Catholic, William Rushworth (d. 1637), that theological propositions could be articulated with the same level of certainty as mathematical ones. Theology, for White, had to be established upon principles of certainty and these could not be derived from the Bible. Instead, White argued that the best foundation for belief was an inerrant oral tradition represented by the Roman Catholic church. However, he denied that any one individual could embody this authority and consequently he repudiated Papal infallibility. The introduction of the novel doctrine of purgatory by the Popes was, for White, the locus classicus of the abuse of Papal authority in doctrinal matters.114 White’s avowed scepticism of ghosts, apparitions and witchcraft, which will be examined in more detail in Chapters 3 and 4 below, derived from his materialism and his conviction that the atoms of the mind could easily affect the rest of the body. On the other hand, White was not an 112   Pagel, W., Joan Baptista van Helmont: Reformer of Science and Religion (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1982), pp. 11–12; Harline (2003), pp. 193–239; Digby, K. (trans. R. White), A late Discourse made in a solemne Assembly … touching the Cure of Wounds by the Powder of Sympathy (London, 1658). 113   White (1656), p. 108. 114   White, T., Religion and Reason mutually corresponding and assisting each other (Paris, 1660), p. 119; Southgate (1993), pp. 37–38.

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anti-supernaturalist and, whilst innovative and radical, he ultimately upheld the authority of an oral tradition that he set above Scripture. White never denied the reality of spirits and he ridiculed Protestant attempts to explain away the ghost of Samuel as a mere trick.115 The Blackloists came from a long line of materialist Aristotelians within the Catholic tradition, and their sceptical stance on witchcraft echoed that of French Aristotelian physicians like Jean Riolan the elder, who denied the philosophical need for demons and bewitchment, and accepted their existence only on the church’s authority.116 Paradoxically, the advance of natural philosophy in the seventeenth century led to a surge of fideism, a reliance on revealed religion as the only certainty in a world where philosophical and scientific certainties were perpetually shifting. In England, it was high churchmen keen to preserve the integrity of orthodoxy who were often the most enthusiastic fideists. The Cambridge Non-Juror Thomas Baker declared that Newton’s physics would be proved false just as Aristotle’s had been, and recommended that we should ‘be content to resolve all into the Power or Providence of God’.117 Thomas White was a fideist of a kind, arguing for religion based on an inerrant oral tradition compatible with, but not demonstrated by reason. On the other hand, White was anything but a fideist in natural science and he insisted that, properly interpreted, Aristotle could be proved right. Southgate has argued that the unpopularity of Aristotle in the second half of the seventeenth century meant that Blackloism soon lost its relevance and disappeared.118 Whilst this may be a fair assessment of the significance of Blackloism within the history of philosophy as a whole, and a reason why it could never gain popularity amongst non-Catholics, English Catholics continued to be educated as Aristotelians until well into the eighteenth century. As an interpretation of the Aristotelian tradition, Blackloism mattered to Catholics long after it had ceased to mean anything to the members of the Royal Society, and Stefania Tutino has argued that Blackloism was a place for political rapprochement between

  White, T., An Apology for Rushworth’s Dialogues (Paris, 1654), p. 221.   Brockliss, L., ‘Seeing is believing: contrasting attitudes towards

115 116

observational autonomy among French Galenists in the first half of the seventeenth century’, in Bynum, W.F. and Porter, R. (eds), Medicine and the Five Senses (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 69–84, at p. 81. 117   Baker, T., Reflections on Learning (London, 1727), p. 99. On high church scepticism of Newtonian mechanism, see Gascoigne, J., ‘Politics, Patronage and Newtonianism: the Cambridge example’, The Historical Journal 27 (1984), pp. 1–24, at pp. 22–4. 118   Southgate (1993), p. 139.

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Catholics and Whigs.119 Furthermore, Blackloist dissent converged to a remarkable extent with the concerns of another theological movement that was gradually gaining ground within the English church, and will be examined in the next chapter: Jansenism.

  Tutino (2008), pp. 144–5.

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CHAPTER 2

Catholicism, Enlightenment and ‘Superstition’ Up to the last decades of the seventeenth century, the twin imperatives of the Counter-Reformation – to combat superstition and uphold the effectiveness of the church’s rites – were held in ‘creative tension’ by the need to combat Protestantism. However, as the balance shifted against the defence of potentially ‘superstitious’ practices and in favour of their rationalization, the Counter-Reformation began to break down and transform itself into the ‘Catholic Enlightenment’. ‘Superstition’ was no longer considered a deviation from right religion but came to mean an excessive credulity and attachment to religion itself, a shift of meaning evident in the writings of Pierre Lebrun on witchcraft, to be examined in Chapter 5 below. However, the arrival of the Catholic Enlightenment was slow and gradual. In the 1730s, a Catholic priest wrote:1 There is no reason to apprehend anithing of a Superstition, as Protestants, without any grounds, would have the world believe, in Attributing to inanimate Created things, thus sanctifyed by prayer Effects that are supernatural. True indeed it is, A downright Superstition it would be undoubtedly, to believe, that Inanimate Created things, should be capable to produce Effects that are supernatural, of themselves alone, independently of God.

However, the extent to which an object could be ‘sanctifyed by prayer’ was precisely what was at issue in the theological contest between the Jansenists and their Jesuit opponents. Although these battles within the European Catholic church produced comparatively small ripples in England, they had a significant psychological impact on a tiny Catholic community in a nation at the heart of radical Enlightenment thinking. Yet just as the influence of the Enlightenment on British governments began to make the religious and political emancipation of the Catholic community an attainable reality, traditional English Catholic reserve with respect to the supernatural came under fierce attack from within the Catholic community itself. 1   Gregory Greenwood, ‘A Short Account of the Blessings of the Catholick Church, Particularly of Holy Water’, Downside Abbey MS 675, fols 18–19.

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Jesuits, Jansenists and the Supernatural From the second half of the seventeenth century onwards, both Catholic and Protestant commentators became concerned that belief in the supernatural in general was in decline and feared that this would eventually have an impact on people’s belief in God. Abandoning belief in ghosts and witches was the start of a ‘slippery slope’ towards atheism. The Protestant clergyman Joseph Glanvill compiled an enormous dossier of evidence for the existence of ghosts and witches in his Saducismus Triumphatus (1680), as an indirect apology for Christian belief. ‘Anti-Sadducism’ became a recognized method of apologetics, especially popular amongst high churchmen. Although they showed less enthusiasm for the anti-Sadducist agenda, Catholic authors of the late seventeenth century were keen to vindicate God’s existence through the veracity of miracles. Miracles took centre stage in the historical writings of the Restoration convert to Catholicism Hugh Serenus Cressy, especially in his Church-History of Brittany (1668), intended as a reply to Foxe’s Acts and Monuments.2 In Kenneth Campbell’s view, Cressy included the miracles ‘not because he believed them all, but to offset the arrogant assertions of Foxe that such miracles were “contrary to the truth of history”’.3 Indeed, Cressy himself declared that ‘I take no pleasure in exscribing the multitude of Miracles with which the following Writers of the middle age have obscured then illustrated the lives of Saints.’4 Cressy was not the first author to counter Foxe’s miracles with Catholic ones; Thomas Stapleton had sought to do exactly the same thing more than a century earlier in his 1565 translation of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History.5 Like Cressy, Abraham Woodhead (1609–78), another convert, deployed miracles in defence of his argument for the infallibility of Catholic tradition. Woodhead noted that ‘[miracles] are become a wonder to other Sects, who, from altogether wanting them, first disbelieve them; and, from this, proceed to despising them; and now at last, it seems, to reproaching them … and reducing them to Fanaticisme.’6 On the other hand, at the end of the seventeenth century, the virtual monopolization of a ‘providentialist’ 2

  For some of Cressy’s accounts of miracles see The Church-History of Brittany from the Beginning of Christianity to the Norman Conquest (Rouen, 1668), pp. 195, 211, 215, 220, 224, 238. 3   Campbell, K.L., The Intellectual Struggle of the English Papists in the Seventeenth Century: The Catholic Dilemma (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1986), p. 144. 4   Cressy (1668), p. 243. 5   Parish (2005), pp. 38–9. 6   [Woodhead, A.], The Roman-Church’s Devotions vindicated from Doctour Stillingfleet’s Mis-representation (1672), n. p. 8. On Woodhead’s use of miracles see Campbell (1986), pp. 146–7.

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reading of history by Whig historiography led the Catholic John Dryden, along with other Tories, to eliminate the providential from their writings. For Whigs, events such as the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the foiling of the Gunpowder Plot and the success of the Williamite invasion were ‘special providences’ and a kind of political miracle, or at least divine intervention. Abigail Williams has argued that, for this very reason, Dryden excluded the possibility of an allegorical, providentialist interpretation of his Fables Ancient and Modern (1700).7 The anti-Sadducist emphasis on the reality of ghosts and witchcraft was an inevitable consequence of the controversial status of miracles within Protestantism. For Catholics, miracles were preferable as evidence of the invisible world. Furthermore, Catholic apologists were primarily concerned with vindicating the Catholic faith against Protestantism rather than upholding the reality of the supernatural as a whole. Cressy and Woodhead hoped to appeal to high church Protestants like they themselves had been, who were hardly likely to doubt the supernatural altogether. However, in the late seventeenth century, scepticism and credulity concerning the miraculous were to some extent a matter of political expediency for both Catholic and Protestant alike. Scepticism served Catholic interests in 1679 when the murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey led to the unmasking of a supposed ‘Popish Plot’ of monumental proportions. Reports of prodigies and apparitions in printed pamphlets stoked anti-Catholic hysteria, but these were answered by the High Tory and crypto-Catholic astrologer John Gadbury (1627–1704), who may later have converted to Catholicism in the reign of James II.8 Gadbury was imprisoned during the course of the Plot as a suspected papist.9 On 12 January 1680, the skies over London mysteriously darkened, and the ghost of Sir Edmund appeared to several people, apparently to confirm the reality of the Plot. Gadbury furnished a naturalistic explanation of the phenomenon and noted that ‘our Ignorance ought not to make Miracles, though it often do so.’10 In 1686, by contrast, a desire to please a Catholic monarch may have motivated the members of the Royal Society to adopt an ‘uncritical acceptance’ of ‘preternatural’ explanations of the flowering of the Glastonbury Thorn and New Forest Oak on Christmas Day.11 James II believed in his own ability to cure scrofula by touching for the King’s Evil 7

  Williams, A., ‘The Politics of Providence in Dryden’s Fables Ancient and Modern’, Translation and Literature 17 (2008), pp. 1–20. 8   Burns, W.E., An Age of Wonders: Prodigies, Politics and Providence in England, 1657–1727 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), p. 40. 9   Curry, P., ‘Gadbury, John’, DNB, vol. 21, pp. 239–42. 10   Gadbury, J., Ephemeris … 1681 (London, 1681), ‘Epistle to the Reader’. 11   Burns (2002), p. 79.

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and sought to associate this supernatural power with the Catholic church, reintroducing the liturgy used in the time of Henry VII and involving the clergy. In Jane Shaw’s view, this tainted the royal touch by association with Catholicism and contributed to its decline and eventual extinction after the death of Queen Anne.12 However, attitudes to the supernatural within the English Catholic community were not only conditioned by domestic events. In Catholic Europe, the caution of Trent was abandoned by some who were keen to appeal to the supernatural in order to sustain what they saw as authentic faith. The theological conflict that erupted between Jesuits and Jansenists produced two theological movements that both regarded themselves as authentic expressions of the Counter-Reformation but appealed to the supernatural in very different ways. In the Dutch Netherlands, a jurisdictional dispute between the Vicars Apostolic of Utrecht and Jesuit missionaries turned into a full-blown permanent schism, driven by the doctrinal polarization of the Jesuits and seculars on the issues of free will, moral laxity and the dispensing of grace. Miracles and exorcisms became disputed issues, with the Jesuits generally supporting them whilst Jansenists called their authenticity into question, believing themselves to be locked in a life-or-death struggle against ignorance and superstition with the Jesuits, protecting both authentic religion and authentic reason.13 In the course of time, both Jesuits and Jansenists acquired their supporters in England. The Jesuits, with their special vow of obedience to the Pope, were seen by some Catholics as well as Protestants as the agents of authoritarian Papalism. The Catholic community in England was, at times, almost completely cut off from direct contact with Rome and, consequently, a spirit of independence flourished. There was no bishop in England until 1625, and even then the authority of the Vicar Apostolic, who did not enjoy true ordinary jurisdiction, was disputed by the regular clergy. Lay patrons were engaged in an ongoing struggle for power with embryonic and inchoate church institutions. Over time, doing things in one’s own way became a habit for English Catholics, and both clergy and laity undoubtedly exploited the somewhat chaotic nature of the mission for their own ends. Whilst the Jesuits maintained that a primary loyalty to Rome constituted the essence of Catholic identity, some Catholics noted that the Jesuits, and

12 13

  Shaw (2006), p. 71.   See Harline (2003), pp. 79–82; De Waardt, H., ‘Jesuits, Propaganda and

Faith Healing in the Dutch Republic’, History 94 (2009), pp. 344–59; Lehner (2010), p. 75.

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no other Catholics, could be held responsible for the harsh government reactions to the Gunpowder Plot and even the fabricated Popish Plot.14 Gabriel Glickman has observed that the English Catholic community, detached from the mainstream of the Counter-Reformation and forced to engage with a Protestant majority, was fertile ground for the more radical Catholic ideas that emerged on the Continent in the seventeenth century.15 In particular, political and ecclesio-political issues internal to the English Catholic community took on a life of their own when combined with a theological and political movement that was transforming the French church from the mid-seventeenth century onwards. ‘Jansenism’ was a mercurial phenomenon that could manifest itself in spirituality, theology and politics, and the label did not always mean the same thing. Jansenists tended to take a rigorist approach to morality, repudiating the Jesuit practice of casuistry and insisting on an almost puritan transparency of conduct. They adopted a strongly Augustinian view of grace and salvation and, in some cases, they were predestinarians. In spirituality, Jansenists tended towards quietism and they disliked rosary beads, scapulas and other aids to devotion,16 as well as discouraging frequent communion as a dangerous trivialization of the sacrament. Given their purist theology of grace they took a very dim view of indulgences. On a political level, Jansenists were focused on the salvation of the individual and, consequently, they were contemptuous of the authority of Rome. The label ‘Jansenist’ was often unjustly applied to those in France who wanted a ‘Gallican’ church free from Papal authority. Not all Gallicans were Jansenists, but it is undeniable that Jansenist theology served the purposes of Gallicans well. It provided an argument that the French church was morally purer than the church of Rome, which was corrupted by Jesuit casuistry and compromise with sin. Ruth Clark, Eamon Duffy and Gabriel Glickman have discussed the extent to which there was such a thing as an English Jansenist movement. It was perhaps inevitable that English clergy predominantly trained in France should have come into contact with Jansenism. Paris, in particular, was the centre of eighteenthcentury Jansenism, and John Betham, the President of St Gregory’s College, which allowed English students to study at the Sorbonne, was suspected of the heresy.17

14

  This was the view taken by John Sergeant and Richard Short at the time of the Popish Plot in 1679 (Krook (1993), pp. 161–2). 15   Glickman (2009), p. 224. 16   In 1704, the English Jansenist Laurence Mayes was alleged to have spoken disparagingly ‘concerning Indulgences, Beads and Scapulars’, Duffy (1977), p. 298. 17   Glickman (2009), pp. 177–8.

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Clark and Duffy drew attention to certain key figures in the English church with Jansenist views, such as John Betham and Dr Richard Short, while Glickman has argued that Jansenism served the purposes of ‘AngloGallican’ Jacobites who felt betrayed by the Papacy, which conspicuously failed to support James II’s campaign in Ireland to regain his throne in 1689–91. Betham even attempted to educate the young James Francis Edward Stuart in Jansenist principles before he was stopped by the pro-Jesuit Queen, Mary of Modena.18 Jansenist views were to be found predominantly amongst the Benedictine and Oratorian clergy of Paris, and unsurprisingly Jansenist sympathies were often to be found among English Benedictines too. Benedictines, to a greater extent than other clergy, were involved in the transfer of Continental spiritual and doctrinal works to the English mission.19 Continental inquisitors considered the English Catholic community to be rife with the heresy of ‘Quesnellism’.20 Pasquier Quesnel was the Jansenist author whose views on grace and predestination were condemned by Pope Clement XI’s Bull Unigenitus in 1713. Richard Short even invited Quesnel to move to England.21 Rome’s concerns about England were probably exaggerated, and there is no evidence that there were collective expressions of Jansenist enthusiasm on the English mission or in English religious houses on the Continent like the convulsions in the cemetery of St Medard in Paris. Nevertheless, moral rigorism was undoubtedly prevalent on the English mission, and the handbooks of John Gother and others encouraged an unworldly, quietist piety.22 It is perhaps unsurprising that a piety founded on contempt of the world found a ready audience among English Catholics who were excluded from all involvement in public life. Moral rigorism and rejection of Enlightenment rationalism in favour of fideism could become the ultimate spiritual expression of ‘sour grapes’ for those excluded from eighteenth century society. Whilst it may be true that English Jansenism itself was, ultimately, ‘a storm in a very small ecclesiastical teacup’,23 Jansenism among English Catholics was important to the extent that it converged with a home-grown Catholic philosophy of dissent, Blackloism. Blackloism was still alive in 1713, the year of Unigenitus, when Charles Dodd noted that ‘the name of Blackloists to this day remains, amongst many of the ancient clergy that 18

Duffy (1977), p. 296. Scott (1992), p. 137. Glickman (2009), p. 177. Clark, R., Strangers and Sojourners at Port Royal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932), p. 167. 22   Glickman (2009), p. 178. 23   Duffy (1977), p. 317.     20   21   19

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were acquainted with, and had a personal esteem for, Mr. White, and were admirers of his surprising talents.’24 Southgate has argued that White and Pascal knew of one another’s work, even if they did not meet in person; they certainly shared a fideistic view of religion and a dislike of the Jesuits.25 Furthermore, Jansenism and Blackloism recruited some of the same personnel. Cressy was converted to Catholicism by the Blackloist Henry Holden, a professor at the Sorbonne, and Cressy was a witness to Thomas White’s will.26 John Betham, also a doctor of the Sorbonne, was labelled as both a Blackloist and a Jansenist during the course of his life,27 and John Belson carried the Blackloist torch well into the eighteenth century.28 Jansenism shared three of the essential components of Blackloism enumerated by George Leyburn in 1657;29 Jansenists were opposed to the idea of Papal infallibility and sceptical of traditional beliefs about purgatory, on account of their perfectionist and predestinarian tendencies. Perhaps most importantly, Jansenists in Holland, which increasingly became the centre of the movement as Louis XIV’s crackdown in France intensified, supported the rights of the English Chapter of the secular clergy, which White had effectively controlled throughout the 1650s, against the jurisdictional claims of the regulars.30 Jansenism had the potential to empower the secular clergy in exactly the same way as Blackloism, by vindicating them against the Jesuits. However, Jansenism differed from Blackloism on the third tenet mentioned by Leyburn: the belief that visions and apparitions were ‘old wives’ tales’. The view of grace adopted by Jansenists led them to reject the idea that it was likely to be transmitted through consecrated objects, and Richard Short called the Jesuits ‘peddlars of cheap grace’.31 However, the Jansenists were none the less preoccupied with the supernatural and what Moshe Sluhovsky has called ‘the value of interiority’.32 However, this preoccupation produced two apparently contradictory approaches to supernatural phenomena among the French Jansenists. On the one 24

Dodd, C., The History of the English College at Doway (1713), p. 27. Southgate (1993), p. 29. Ibid., p. 34. Duffy (1977), p. 296. Glickman (2009), p. 238. [Leyburn, G.], The Summe of Doctor Leyburnes Answere to a Letter printed against him by Mr Blakloe (Douai, 1657), pp. 32–3. 30   Clark (1932), pp. 168–9. 31   Duffy (1977), p. 304. 32   Sluhovsky, M., Believe not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism and Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 120.     26   27   28   29   25

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hand, the Jansenist Abbess of Maubuisson, Marie des Anges, opposed the spiritual practices of the Cistercian Louis Quinet who encouraged the nuns to seek God through ‘spiritual nakedness’ (sometimes even involving possession) in 1627. Here, the Jansenist emphasis was on penance, mortification and monastic observance rather than ‘spiritual works’.33 A century later, however, in 1725, Jansenist devotees flocked to the tomb of the young deacon François de Pâris in the cemetery of St Medard and experienced spiritual ecstasies and physical convulsions. Not surprisingly, the phenomenon of the ‘convulsionaries’ divided the Jansenist movement.34 It is probable that the Jansenist controversy meant comparatively little to the majority of the Catholic laity in England. As a tiny minority in a Protestant country, they already knew the sense of separation and ‘holiness’ that the Jansenists sought and they did not need to manufacture it. Jesuit spiritual works continued to be popular alongside ‘Jansenist’ ones, and there was no sense that the Jansenists ever gained control of the English mission. What was of more concern to Rome was that, in the absence of ordinary episcopal jurisdiction, heterodox opinions were able to flourish in England unchecked. However, the radically different conclusions reached by missionary priests concerning the reality of spiritual phenomena did reflect the theological gulf that separated the Jesuits from those with a more Jansenistic outlook. In the late seventeenth century, the Jesuit Annual Letters were replete with cases of demonic possession that were solved as soon as they appeared with the application of anything from the ‘Water of St Ignatius’ to Agnus Deis, and as late as 1737, a pamphlet reported the miraculous cure of the young son of Caryl Hawarden of Appleton, Lancashire, by the application of the hand of the Jesuit Edmund Arrowsmith, martyred in 1628.35 For those who regarded grace as less easily distributed, possession was a more serious matter and it was unlikely to be solved by a straightforward exorcism. One solution for moral rigorists was to deny that possession happened much at all. The Carmelite Bede Travers (who certainly displayed rigorist traits) declared in the 1670s, ‘It should be noticed that cases of real diabolical possession are exceedingly rare in this country. In the course of nineteen years I have never come across a single one.’36 33 34

  Sluhovsky (2007), pp. 145–7.   On St Medard, see Knox, R., Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of

Religion (Oxford: Clarendon, 1950), pp. 372–88. 35   A True and Exact Relation of the Death of Two Catholicks (London, 1737), pp. vi–xi. The story of Hawarden’s cure is appended to an earlier account of Arrowsmith’s martyrdom and it seems likely that this book was a Jesuit production. 36   Zimmerman, B., Carmel in England: A History of the English Mission of the Discalced Carmelites, 1615 to 1849 (London: Burns and Oates, 1899), p. 260.

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It is probable that the ‘trivialization’ of exorcism by the Jesuits and the rise of Jansenist ideas about grace led, ultimately, to a discreet silence on the matter among the rest of the clergy. Open denial of the efficacy of means of grace would have led to accusations of Jansenism, so the majority of the secular clergy probably refrained from saying anything at all. It is difficult, if not impossible, to prove an argument from silence, but the fact remains that, with a few exceptions such as Gregory Greenwood, the Catholic clergy in England largely stopped talking about exorcism and demonic possession in the eighteenth century. The supernatural was simply too controversial a subject within the Catholic community itself. Whilst it may be true that sensitivity to Enlightenment scepticism affected some priests and laity, the evidence suggests that the vast majority of Catholics did not lose their belief in the supernatural during the eighteenth century. From 1714 onwards, English Catholics were embroiled, whether they liked it or not, in the dynastic conflict over the English crown between the Catholic James Edward Stuart, the ‘Old Pretender’, and the Protestant Electors of Hanover. The willingness of some Jacobites to accept supernatural phenomena and prodigies as signs of the justice of their cause added a new, political reason for their opponents to accuse Catholics of superstition. Sasha Handley and Paul Monod have drawn attention to the use of supernatural themes in Jacobite ballads such as ‘The Duchess of York’s Ghost’ and ‘Towneley’s Ghost’.37 However, it is often forgotten that, in England, the majority of Jacobite supporters were high church Anglicans rather than Catholics. Furthermore, not all Catholics were Jacobites, so Handley’s uncritical identification of Jacobite interest in the supernatural with Catholic attitudes is hazardous. The Jacobite reputation for credulity largely derived from Whig accounts and ‘unmediated Jacobite responses are hard to recover.’38 While his high church counterpart Henry Prescott interpreted the aurora seen in the night sky on 6 March 1716 as a providential sign, the Catholic Jacobite Nicholas Blundell regarded it merely as spectacle.39 Indeed, since high church Tories were in search of a strong political and religious identity after 1689 to distinguish themselves from their Latitudinarian counterparts, they seem to have been more willing than Catholics (who already had a strongly defined identity) to embrace supernatural phenomena with enthusiasm. There is no evidence 37

  Handley (2007), p. 46; Monod, P.K., Jacobitism and the English People, 1688–1788 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 56. 38   Burns (2002), p. 158. 39   Ibid. p. 159; Blundell, N. (ed. T.E. Gibson), Blundell’s Diary: Comprising Selections from the Diary of Nicholas Blundell Esq. from 1702–1728 (Liverpool: Gilbert G. Walmsley, 1895), p. 142: ‘I went to see the Apparitions in the Air lick Clouds of Fier and Smoke.’

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that any Catholics were ever involved in the Tory campaign to retain the Witchcraft Act, for example. Pope and the Supernatural The poet Alexander Pope (1688–1744), who has received more attention from scholars than any other English Catholic, has usually been seen as a sceptic prepared to subject superstition to mockery in his poetry. Alison Shell described The Rape of the Lock as ‘perhaps the most authoritative Catholic riposte to Protestant accusations of promiscuous superstition’.40 The intention of the poem was to ‘deflect accusations of superstition temporarily away from Catholics and onto weak wits or the unlearned’.41 Shell’s argument supposes that Pope feared being accused of actually believing in the spiritual beings that populated The Rape of the Lock, which were drawn from a satirical novel inspired by Paracelsus and Rosicrucian literature by a French priest, Nicholas Pierre Henri de Villars, Le Comte de Gabalis (1670). Whilst it is true that Pope expressed anxiety about the superstitions of Continental Catholics, this hardly amounts to evidence that Pope himself was concerned about accusations being made against him. The fact that Pope did not include his supernatural ‘machinery’ in the first version of the poem (1712), which was published anonymously, yet added it to the 1714 version that was widely circulated, would seem to suggest that the opposite was true. It seems highly unlikely that any Protestant reader of Pope’s mockheroic poem, even if he did recognize the Rosicrucianism of the Abbé de Villars, would have associated it with the Catholic identity of the poet. Shell’s interpretation of The Rape as a ‘Catholic riposte’ is far-fetched, as is Alastair Fowler’s suggestion that Pope’s use of Rosicrucian imagery derived from his interest in Freemasonry.42 Whilst there was strong Jacobite and Catholic involvement in the Masonic movement,43 eighteenth-century English Freemasons had little or no interest in its supposedly Rosicrucian elements. Bonnie Latimer has demonstrated that Pope’s use of the term ‘Rosicrucian’ to describe his machinery was imprecise; the cosmology of

40

  Shell (2007), p. 79.   Ibid., p. 80. 42   Fowler, A., ‘The Paradoxical Machinery of The Rape of the Lock’ in 41

Nicolson, C., Alexander Pope: Essays for the Tercentenary (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1988), pp. 151–70, at p. 154. 43   Glickman (2009), pp. 234–6.

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gnomes and sylphs in Le Comte de Gabalis was, properly, Paracelsan.44 Furthermore, Le Comte de Gabalis was itself a work of satire and it is no more likely that Pope took it seriously than that his own readers took seriously the machinery of The Rape.45 In his dedicatory epistle to Arabella Fermor, Pope himself explained the necessity of supernatural ‘machinery’, demanded by poetic convention even in a comic poem. Neither Miltonic angels nor classical gods and goddesses were appropriate for satire, so Pope constructed his poem ‘on a very new and odd Foundation, the Rosicrucian Doctrine of Spirits’.46 The Paracelsan sylphs of The Rape were ‘new’ and ‘odd’ because, not having seen them before, Pope’s readers would find them surprising and entertaining. There is no reason to suppose that Pope made a special effort to mock the Rosicrucian spirits because he feared being accused of superstition, although it is possible that Pope deployed them because they had no specific denominational associations. However, Pope’s decision to use sylphs and gnomes in his poem is evidence of the influence of an increasingly urbane French attitude to the occult on English Catholics. The fact that Pope drew upon a French ‘Rosicrucian’ novel for the ‘machinery’ of his poem demonstrates, at the very least, that English Catholics were prepared to venture into the more eccentric recesses of Continental spirituality. Patricia Brückmann argued that an older strand of Neoplatonic mysticism in the Catholic community could have given rise to Pope’s interest in Rosicrucianism, pointing to the elaborate Neoplatonic masques staged at the court of Queen Henrietta Maria and, later, Bishop Stillingfleet’s comparison of Serenus Cressy’s defence of Julian of Norwich with the arguments of a ‘Rosycrucian’.47 However, Brückmann’s assimilation of mystical spirituality to Neoplatonism makes a conceptual and historical leap that few English Catholics were prepared to make. They were defined, if anything, by their strongly ‘Aristotelian’ prejudice against Neoplatonic philosophical speculation, and Brückmann herself admitted that Pope took his inspiration not from home-grown recusant authors but from Erasmus, Pascal and Fénelon. Pope was unusual among educated Catholics in being unfettered by a conventional Catholic education at Douai or St Omer, and his attraction to Pascal and Fénelon was a symptom of the Jansenistic and fideistic impulses that seemed to many Catholics the best response to the Enlightenment. However, Pope’s universalist approach to spirituality belonged to a 44   Latimer, B., ‘Alchemies of Satire: A History of the Sylphs in The Rape of the Lock’, Review of English Studies 57 (2006), pp. 684–700, at pp. 686–7. 45   Ibid., pp. 689–90. 46   Pope, Poems, p. 217. 47   Brückmann (1988), pp. 12, 14.

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distinctive British and Irish strand of Catholic Enlightenment thought that included figures such as Andrew Michael Ramsay, Simon Berington and Nathaniel Hooke. These authors all argued for an interior spirituality that would overcome barriers of prejudice and intolerance, whilst insisting that Catholics ought to embrace the theories of Newton and Boyle.48 With the exception of Alison Shell’s commentary, recent criticism of the role of the supernatural in The Rape has tended to emphasize that, in some sense, Pope intended the sylphs, gnomes and elves to be significant beyond a mockery of poetic convention and superstition. Brückmann has seen links between Pope’s poem and Catholic manuals of spirituality, Latimer has argued for an overtly erotic interpretation of the ‘Rosicrucian’ elements,49 and Fowler has argued that ‘[Pope’s] spirits are not supernatural at all, but natural female types after death, or abstraction.’ Pope ‘methodically replaces supernatural machinery by internal “spirits”’;50 the spiritual creatures of The Rape are poetic descriptions of genuine states of mind and spirit that exist in the characters. In a similar vein, Pat Rogers has argued that the ‘machinery’ of The Rape of the Lock is not inert mockery but embodies a genuine ‘psychodrama’ in which ‘the real colliding forces are supernatural.’ Pope went beyond Le Comte de Gabalis and drew the sinister gnomes from ‘some deep recess of the poetical imagination’.51 The machinery of The Rape was drawn as much from ‘traditional beliefs relating to the fairy kingdom’ as it was from literary allusions to a French Rosicrucian text.52 There is little evidence that Pope was taken as seriously by his own contemporaries as he is by contemporary scholars. However, Pope’s machinery came from France and went back to France, where Pope’s popularity exceeded that of any previous English author.53 The French translator of The Rape urged caution concerning the use of Rosicrucian imagery. The Abbé Desfontaines (Pierre-François Guyot) observed in the preface to his 1728 translation that Pope’s poem was the first to use ‘the imaginary system of the Cabbalists’ taken from Le Comte de Gabalis, but he noted that ‘It is necessary to observe that it is only in a poem of this genre that it has a place.’54 He was concerned, in other words, that 48

On the early British Catholic Enlightenment see Glickman (2009), pp. 221–39. Latimer (2006), pp. 695–700. Fowler (1988), pp. 152–3. Rogers, P., ‘Faery lore and The Rape of the Lock’ in Rogers, Essays on Pope (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 70–84, at p. 84. 52   Rogers (1993), p. 79. 53   On the reception of Pope in France, see France, P., ‘The French Pope’ in Nicolson (1988), pp. 117–29. 54   Barnard, J. (ed.), Alexander Pope: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 110–11.     50   51   49

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the occult speculations of De Villars should not inspire serious poetry. However, the Abbé Desfontaines’s remark was not so much a criticism of Pope as an endorsement of the effectiveness of his attack on superstition, which emptied the occult hierarchies of Paracelsus of their power, to such an extent that they were neutralized and acceptable to French Catholic readers under a satirical guise. For the most developed statements of his attitude towards superstition and the place of the supernatural, we should look to Pope’s Essay on Man (1734) rather than The Rape of the Lock. Here, Pope insisted that nothing could be known beyond human experience, whatever other beings God might have created:55 Of Man what see we, but his station here, From which to reason, or to which refer? Thro’ worlds unnumber’d tho the God be known, ’Tis ours to trace him only in our own.

On the other hand, the poet was prepared to acknowledge the existence of unseen forces in human life:56 So man, who here seems principal alone, Perhaps acts second to some sphere unknown, Touches some wheel, or verges to some goal; ’Tis but a part we see, and not a whole.

Pope portrayed the rise of superstition in ancient times as the product of cowardice: ‘Fear made her devils, and weak hope her gods’. The fact that the Greek and Roman gods resembled human beings in their corrupt nature meant that superstition not only served to keep the oppressed in their place but was also shared by their rulers:57 Gods partial, changeful, passionate, unjust, Whose attributes were rage, revenge, or lust; Such as the souls of cowards might conceive, And, formed like tyrants, tyrants would believe.

Superstition was against nature, which inclines men to worship one god; by constructing gods in their own imperfect image, the ancients destroyed all sense of the sacred, and as a result their religion came to consist of 55

  Pope, A., ‘An Essay on Man’ I.1.19–22 (Poems, pp. 504–5).   Ibid., I.2.57–60 (Poems, p. 506). 57   Ibid., III.6.257–260 (Poems, p. 533). 56

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empty cruelty: ‘Then sacred seemed the ethereal vault no more; / Altars grew marble then, and reeked with gore’. Pope’s account of superstition included no explicit denunciation of the beliefs of the Greeks and Romans as irrational, although this was arguably implicit in his view that they were against nature. However, this was an argument that reached as far back as Augustine’s City of God and beyond that to St Paul’s Letter to the Romans. In contrast to the stereotyped Protestant view that superstition was cynically enforced from the top down, first by Emperors and then by Popes, Pope was fascinated by the inherent cowardice that rendered even the most powerful slaves to illusions of their own making. However, the fact that Pope was a more profound commentator on human nature than the majority of his contemporaries did not necessarily make his analysis more Catholic, except to the extent that An Essay on Man belonged to the European humanist tradition rather than the aggressive rationalism of Hanoverian Britain. In a letter to Edward Blount in August 1714, Pope expressed surprise that the besieged inhabitants of Barcelona expected ‘Angels from heaven to their assistance’, and added, ‘May I venture to say, who am a Papist, that nothing is more astonishing to me, than that people so greatly warm’d with a sense of Liberty, should be capable of harbouring such weak Superstition, and that so much bravery and so much folly, can inhabit the same breasts?’58 Pope’s choice of words suggests that he thought others would consider a papist capable of any degree of superstition, but his concern at the prevalence of superstition in Barcelona should not be seen as a reflection of his own fears for the English Catholic community. Rather, his surprise at the coexistence of superstition and a desire for liberty should be seen in the context of the strong association between superstition and tyranny that he later established in An Essay on Man. English Catholics and the ‘New Philosophy’ In the mid-eighteenth century, rather than retreating into a backwardlooking form of Scholasticism, some English Catholics began to explore fully the intellectual opportunities offered by the ‘new philosophy’, which could mean anything from the mind-body dualism of Descartes to the mechanism of Newton. It seems likely that such exploration was begun by the laity. In the 1730s, the library of the Rookwood family in Suffolk contained, alongside innumerable works of Jesuit spirituality, a copy of the third

58

  Alexander Pope to Edward Blount, 27 August 1714, in Pope, A. (ed. G. Sherburn), The Correspondence of Alexander Pope (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956), vol. 1, pp. 246–7.

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edition of Antoine Le Grand’s Cartesian Institutio Philosophiae (1675).59 It was not until the 1750s that Luke Joseph Hooke (1716–96), a professor at the Sorbonne who was the son of the Jacobite historian Nathaniel Hooke (d. 1763), began to push the boundaries of Catholic philosophy, followed and supported enthusiastically by the monks of St Edmund’s, Paris. Geoffrey Scott saw Hooke’s theology as part of a ‘Jesuit humanist theology’ that ‘whittled away unpalatable definitions of sin, revelation and the nature of the supernatural’.60 In his Religionis Naturalis et Revelatae Principia (‘Principles of Natural and Revealed Religion’ (1754), Hooke criticized the miracles in the lives of the saints and was careful to point out that no one should believe in the Catholic faith because of miracles: ‘No Catholic doctrine is believed on account of any of these miracles, which do not contain any revelation.’61 Whilst the belief that no new revelation was possible was orthodox Catholic doctrine, Hooke went further by claiming that no individual ought to be convinced by miraculous evidence alone. He lamented that ‘Men are so composed by nature, that at the lightest manifestation of supernatural power they are greatly moved.’62 Hooke supported Pope Benedict XIV’s view of miracles expressed in his De Servorum Dei Beatificatione, et Beatorum Canonisatione (‘On the Beatification of Servatns of God and Canonization of the Blessed’) (1734): ‘Unaccustomed and remarkable effects, which exceed men and the visible and corporeal faculty of created nature, known by us, are miracles, but the lesser miracles are those which exceed men and the invisible and incorporeal faculty of nature.’ Hooke concluded that ‘It is necessary and sufficient to a true miracle that it should be above every natural virtue of natural causes, visible and corporeal.’63 In other words, whilst ‘miracles of grace’ such as conversions and visions were miracles in a lesser way, only those miracles which could be assessed empirically were miracles in the true sense. Hooke devoted a considerable portion of his treatise on miracles in the first volume of his Religionis Naturalis to opposing the view that the devil had the power to lead people into error with false revelations. He argued that demons only had as much power as God was prepared to give them, and he would not give them the power to corrupt revelation: ‘The 59

  CUL Hengrave MS 77/2, fol. 33r.   See Scott (1992), pp. 164–5. On Protestant and Catholic attitudes to

60

miracles in the Age of Enlightenment, see Dear, P., ‘Miracles, Experiments, and the ordinary Course of Nature’, Isis 81 (1981), pp. 663–83; Shaw, J., Miracles in Enlightenment England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), pp. 23–30. 61   Hooke, L.J., Religionis Naturalis et Revelatae Principia (Paris, 1754), vol. 3, p. 613 62   Ibid., vol. 1, p. 704. 63   Ibid., vol. 1, p. 691.

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power of demons should not be regarded at all (nullatenus sit perspecta); it is all, as I have said, a presumption (praesumptio) on the part of God, and all of the supernatural works attributed to them are so provisionally (provisorie).’64 In other words, ‘supernatural’ effects attributed to demonic agency are not truly supernatural at all, but only insofar as they have been permitted by God. Hooke did not deny that the devil had power to work miracles, but he greatly restricted the possible extent of those miracles:65 We do not in any way deny, that demons may be able to do many wonders, with the permission of God; nor do we deny, that they have often involved themselves in human affairs at God’s command, either for testing the good, or punishing the bad. We deny only that they have ever overturned the course of nature to the confirmation of error.

Instead of presenting human beings as victims of the devil, Hooke portrayed humans as victims of their own ignorance and superstition, exploited by the devil for that reason: ‘So great is the imbecility of men, that it is a game for the malice of the devil. Demons disturb nature so that they may drag men into all wickedness, and they surround miserable mortals, afraid at every sudden noise, with supernatural terrors on all sides.’66 The clear implication of Hooke’s argument is that, once freed from superstitious terror, human beings are no longer an attractive target for the devil’s malice. If people understood that the devil had no real power, he would cease to molest them. Hooke’s view was a Catholic version of the eighteenth-century warning against superstition, constructed in such a way as to preserve the reality of the devil and orthodox doctrine. It echoed Gregory Greenwood’s view that the devil had no power to make people believe falsehoods:67 This puts them upon other crafty shifts, & forces ’em to go some other way to work, to bring their design about. They are sensible, that tis Impossible even to effect it, utterly in vain to attempt it, unless by their sly Temptations, or some other false delusions, they can inveigle us in, freely to consent to disbelieve the Trinity.

In 1749, St Edmund’s became the centre of the ‘Society of St Edmund’, a ‘philosophical college’ that sought to imitate the Royal Society and provide a rigorous training in natural philosophy for Benedictine missionary priests 64

    66   67   65

Ibid., p. 703. Ibid., pp. 721–2. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 704. Three Discourses, fol. 54.

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who would soon encounter Enlightenment England. However, the Society of St Edmund also included secular clergy and lay members, who espoused Newtonian physics and sought to overturn prevailing Protestant assumptions about monkish learning.68 However, the Benedictine Enlightenment project was sometimes intriguingly elided with earlier beliefs. For instance, there was a lasting belief among lay Catholics (and even beyond the Catholic community) that Benedictine monks possessed special medical knowledge, especially in herbal medicine. It is unclear whether this belief represented a lingering memory of monastic involvement in mediaeval healthcare or whether it grew out of stereotypical representations of monks as herbalists. Here, as elsewhere, the origins of sub-Catholic superstitions are elusive. The monk Gilbert Knowles produced a comprehensive herbal, Materia Medica Botanica, in 1723, which was printed by a mainstream London publisher and even dedicated to an Anglican bishop; Knowles was held in high regard by the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Wake.69 The strong Benedictine presence in Bath in the mid-eighteenth century was fortuitous in allowing monks to exploit the belief in their medical powers, and several monks composed ‘receipts’ for patent medicines which were shared by a missionary priest, Roger Joseph Whittell, and copied out by the laity in the 1750s.70 Paradoxically, the Benedictines seem to have exploited a folkbelief in their healing powers to present a fashionable image of themselves as learned representatives of the Enlightenment. The Supernatural and the Birth of Emancipation, 1778–1829 The political and legal emancipation of the English Catholic community was a gradual and halting process, beginning in 1778 and concluding with the Catholic Relief Act of 1829. In 1778, Catholics were admitted to the army, and in 1791, Catholic places of worship were officially permitted. In practice, however, an increasingly secular national culture, the final death of the Jacobite movement in 1788, and the wave of sympathy for the persecuted Catholic clergy and aristocracy of France among England’s elite, already allowed English Catholics to enjoy a largely normal social existence with freedom of worship. English Catholics were the indirect victims of the establishment’s deep-seated fear of Irish Catholicism, and full Emancipation was retarded by the fact that, by the Act of Union of 1801, legislation passed in the Westminster Parliament applied to both 68   On the Society of St Edmund, see Scott (1992), pp. 155–8; Glickman (2009), pp. 236–7. 69   Scott (1992), p. 150. 70   Ibid., p. 149.

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English and Irish Catholics. However, at the same time, a fierce struggle was being fought within the English Catholic community between those determined to speed up the Emancipation process by means of concessions to the government and those determined to preserve what they saw as the integrity of the Catholic faith. The phenomenon of the ‘English Catholic Enlightenment’ has been treated by Brian Carter, Joseph P. Chinnici, John Hilton and Peter Phillips.71 The majority of studies have concentrated on the historian John Lingard (1771–1851), who was a relative latecomer to the ecclesiopolitical struggle between ‘Cisalpines’ and ‘ultramontanes’. Although, as Carter argued, the ‘spirit of the Enlightenment’ played only a small part in achieving Emancipation,72 which was driven primarily by developing events in Ireland, the internal battle that preceded Emancipation had an undeniable theological dimension. The theological battle-lines were drawn around interpretations of and responses to supernatural phenomena. In the second half of the eighteenth century, Pope’s view that superstition was engendered by fear was challenged by the Irish priest and educationalist James Usher (1720–71), who founded a school for Catholic boys in Kensington in 1769. Usher argued that ‘It was not fear made the gods, but God made his presence known by an awe that does not attend on sensible objects.’73 The ancients were not altogether mistaken in venerating groves and rivers, since they rightly perceived the presence of the divine;74 rather, they were mistaken in dividing the divine into more than one being. Usher argued that a ‘universal spirit’ dwelling in the soul was the cause of ‘enthusiasm’, and that poetic and religious inspiration amounted to the same thing.75 Indeed, Usher seems to have been more troubled by ‘fanaticism’ and ‘enthusiasm’ in religion, which he considered to be misdirected uses of the ‘universal spirit’, than by poetic reveries that could be construed as

  Carter, B., ‘Controversy and Conciliation in the English Catholic Enlightenment, 1790–1840’, Enlightenment and Dissent 7 (1988) pp. 3–24; Chinnici, J.P., The English Catholic Enlightenment: John Lingard and the Cisalpine Movement, 1780–1850 (Shepherdstown, WV: Patmos Press, 1980); Hilton, J.A., A Catholic of the Enlightenment: Essays on Lingard’s Life and Times (Wigan: North West Catholic History Society, 1999); Phillips, P. (ed.), Lingard Remembered: essays to mark the sesquicentary of John Lingard’s death (London: CRS, 2004); Phillips, P., John Lingard: Priest and Historian (Leominster: Gracewing, 2008). 72   Carter (1988), p. 21. 73   Usher, J., Clio: or, a Discourse on Taste, 2nd edn (London, 1770), p. 123. 74   Usher, J., A New System of Philosophy, founded on the Universal Operations of Nature (London, 1766), p. 73. 75   Usher (1770), pp. 121–2. 71

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revivals of pagan worship.76 Usher’s devotion to a Romantic ideal of the sublime did not diminish his suspicion of anti-intellectualism in religion. In her novel A Simple Story (1791), Elizabeth Inchbald was careful to distance her principal male character, an ex-Jesuit named Dorriforth, from the standard stereotype of the Catholic priest. She informed her readers that Dorriforth was ‘bred at St Omer’s in all the scholastic rigour of that college’. By means of a process of ‘nicely discriminating’ between the ‘philosophical’ and ‘superstitious’ parts of his education and identity, Dorriforth ‘possessed qualities not unworthy the first professors of Christianity’.77 In other words, it is Dorriforth’s virtues, rather than his priestly and religious calling, that define his character. Inchbald’s portrait was exactly what liberal, Cisalpine Catholics wanted to present to the world, but there was an underlying tension. Inchbald did not deny the ‘superstitious’ aspects of Dorriforth’s education at St Omer, and by acknowledging them, she endorsed a post-Enlightenment definition of superstition that differed markedly from internal Catholic formulations. Furthermore, Dorriforth’s behaviour, ‘nicely discriminating’, suggests a degree of dissimulation on his part. Indeed, ‘nice discrimination’ suggests casuistry, at which the Jesuits stereotypically excelled. Thus Dorriforth may be more Jesuitical than he is at first made to seem. Michael Tomko has argued that Dorriforth is ‘a nervous, vulnerable figure tentatively hovering on the margins of modernity’,78 and this seems a fair characterization of many English Catholics in the late eighteenth century. Anxious to portray themselves as friends of the Enlightenment, most did not display Pope’s self-confidence and were grounded in a conventional, orthodox personal piety. They were constantly aware of the significance of the mediaeval past in legitimating their church as well as the Protestant ‘black legends’ associating them with darkness, superstition and deceit. In 1782, a group of liberal-minded laymen established the ‘Catholic Committee’ (later to become the ‘Cisalpine Club’) to advance the cause of Catholic Emancipation. These men were ‘Cisalpines’ because they denied the Pope’s right to exercise temporal jurisdiction ‘beyond the Alps’, and regarded him as a spiritual figure whose position of canonical authority in the church was a matter of ecclesiastical, rather than divine law. This was in many ways a revival of Anglo-Gallican doctrine as well as even earlier strands in English Catholicism, such as the political philosophy of the Appellants of the early seventeenth century, and indeed the Cisalpines made extensive use of Appellant literature. The Cisalpines belonged to 76   Usher (1766), p. 52 wrote approvingly of ‘noble, soul-taught, enthusiastic philosophy … the philosophy of untutored, unprejudiced spirit’. 77   Inchbald, E., A Simple Story (London, 1791), vol. 1, p. 1. 78   Tomko (2011), p. 56.

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what Chinnici has described as ‘an Anglo-French orthodox theological and political tradition critical of Counter-Reformation Catholicism’.79 Two of the key clerical supporters of the Cisalpine cause were Joseph Cuthbert Wilks (1748–1829) and Joseph Berington (1743–1827). Wilks was a monk of St Edmund’s, Paris, steeped in the open rationalist tradition of the Society of St Edmund. He was denied his doctorate when he refused to take an oath affirming the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, and in 1788, he became a member of the Catholic Committee.80 Wilks provided a link between the Cisalpines and the older, Parisian culture of liberal English Catholic thought associated with Luke Joseph Hooke and his followers. Joseph Berington was a secular priest and a practised controversialist, whose turbulent career brought him into direct conflict not only with the ultramontanes but also with his own superiors. Just as with the Blackloists and Jansenists (and perhaps even more so), suspicion of the supernatural came to characterize the Cisalpines, although this time it had little to do with their doctrine of grace and more to do with the Cisalpines’ desire to make Catholicism comprehensible to a sceptical age. Their ultramontane opponents saw the Cisalpines’ desire to accommodate rationalism and their unwillingness to endorse supernatural phenomena as an opportunity to call into question the sincerity of their Catholicism. Chinnici has argued that the gradual acceptance of the ultramontane endorsement of miracles and devotions such as the Litany of Loreto represented the influence of Romanticism on the Catholic community, against the austere piety of the eighteenth century.81 However, controversy concerning the supernatural was at first overtly political rather than cultural. In October 1796, Berington published a commentary on reports of miracles in Italy, which was then being invaded by the French Revolutionary Army. Berington was scandalized not so much by the miracles themselves but by the fact that there were English Catholics prepared to believe and promote them in a rational age: ‘Whilst I pity the superstition and blind credulity in which the descendents of the once masters of the world are held enthralled, I am amazed that men can here be found, who will give their belief to such unworthy tales.’82 He argued that defenders of Christianity against atheism and scepticism should concentrate their efforts on a defence of the miracles of the Gospel, rather than ‘accumulating prodigies’,83 and he attributed the Italian phenomena to self-deception and 79

Chinnici, P., ‘Berington, Joseph’ in DNB, vol. 5, pp. 350–52. Scott (1992), p. 203. Chinnici (1980), p. 144. Berington, J., An Examination of Events Termed Miraculous, as Reported in Letters from Italy (Oxford, 1796), p. 5. 83   Ibid., p. 6.     81   82   80

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crowd hysteria.84 At the same time, however, he acknowledged political overtones to the Papacy’s silence on the issue of the miracles, which he interpreted as a measure intended to strengthen support for the temporal power of the Papal States through popular devotion.85 Berington deployed examples of recent miracle-workers, such as Benedict Joseph Labre and François de Pâris, to argue that reports of miracles were often motivated by church politics. He noted that ‘a late Papal envoy to this country, if he be not still here was greatly instrumental in proving, during the process of the canonization of Labre, that “so far from working miracles and being a Saint, he was hardly a Catholic”.’ The envoy in question was probably Cardinal Erskine. Berington located the cases of both Labre and de Pâris in the context of the conflict between Jesuits and Jansenists, and claimed that the Jesuits had set up a ‘rival thaumaturgist’ to Labre. All of this demonstrated the political nature of miracles. Berington gave three reasons for writing: to convince Protestants that Catholics were free to discuss the veracity or otherwise of miracles, to preempt the criticisms of Catholicism which would be the inevitable outcome of the circulation of the Italian stories, and ‘to check, if it may be, the attempts of men, who, it is plain, are labouring to impress on the minds of English Catholics a belief in prodigies, and to disfigure their religion with the abuses of image-worship, from which, fortunately, it has been freed’. He was critical of ‘Those, who weakly think, that no untruth can come from Rome’ and ‘who fancy that the integrity, if not the existence, of their religion is connected with the perpetuity of miracles’. Berington articulated what was effectively a cessationist theology of miracles. Only the miracles of the New Testament were required to demonstrate the truth of Christianity: ‘Fortunately, the defenders of the great cause of our common christianity have, long ago, surrendered this point … With what the Deity has done for his own work, in the foundation of Christianity, let us be satisfied.’86 Berington’s treatise received a reply first from an anonymous ‘Catholic lady’,87 and then from John Milner, then a missionary priest in Winchester and the most fearsome defender of the ultramontane position. Milner responded with an acidic attack on Berington’s theology of miracles (but primarily his politics) in 1797.88 Predictably, Milner seized on Berington’s 84

Ibid., p. 11. Ibid., pp. 20–21. Ibid., pp. 29–31. ‘A Catholic Lady’, A Few Thoughts on the Rev. Joseph Berington’s Examination of Events, termed Miraculous, as reported in letters from Italy (London, 1796). 88   Milner, J., A Serious Expostulation with the Rev. Joseph Berington, upon his Theological Errors concerning Miracles (London, 1797).     86   87   85

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cessationism, which was associated with Calvinistic Protestantism,89 and claimed to understand the real reason for his opposition to supernaturalism:90 The zeal which you display against the late reported prodigies is easily accounted for: through their sides you endeavour to stab the credit of all miraculous operations, performed since the days of the apostles, and the motive of this opposition to them is obviously displayed: you are sensible that your projected reform of alledged superstition with respect to images, relicks, &c. can never take place, whilst Catholics are persuaded that God has sanctioned the opinions and practices in question by acknowledged miracles.

In other words, Milner believed that Berington’s attack on the Italian miracles was merely one part of a campaign to ‘reform’ English Catholicism. However, Milner attacked not only those who opposed miracles but also those who remained silent about them. In 1806, he warned that ‘it is bare cowardice and treachery to deny or conceal the manifestations and wonderful works of the Most High, for fear of the censure and ridicule of prophane and unbelieving mortals.’91 In 1803, Milner had become Vicar Apostolic of the Midland District, and members of his own clergy who had earlier subscribed to Berington’s ‘Staffordshire Creed’ condemning excessive Papal intrusion were the likely targets of his criticism. The controversy concerning the supernatural continued even after Emancipation when, in 1831, John Lingard proposed a naturalistic explanation for the liquefaction of the blood of St Januarius in Naples.92 Lingard opposed ‘innovations’ that he regarded as superstitious and incomprehensible to Protestants and new converts, such as the Litany of Loreto.93 Because of and in reaction to Cisalpine accommodation of Enlightenment rationalism, ultramontanes on the eve of Emancipation were ardent advocates of the reality of the supernatural. Not only did supernatural events such as miracles and exorcisms demonstrate that the sceptics were wrong, they also often confirmed the power of the church and its clergy and argued for an unapologetic Catholicism that need make no concessions to Protestant prejudice. Attitudes to the supernatural became 89

  Ibid., p. 15.   Ibid., p. 18. 91   Milner, J., Authentic Documents Relative to the Miraculous Cure of 90

Winefrid White, of Wolverhampton, at St. Winefrid’s Well (London, 1806), p. 24. 92   On the miracles controversy, see Chinnici (1980), pp. 137–9; Richardson, P., ‘John Lingard and the English Catholic Periodical Press, 1809–1841’ in Phillips (2004), pp. 65–81, at pp. 70–72. 93   Phillips (2004), pp. 73–4.

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a means of distinguishing between ‘old’ and ‘new’ English Catholics. On the one hand, the old Catholics clung to the eighteenth-century idea of a rapprochement between Christians of different denominations through a common language of reason and a constitutional accommodation whereby Catholics acknowledged their primary loyalty to the Crown. On the other, a new breed of ultramontane Catholics saw the aggressive assertion and celebration of Catholic difference as the only means to guarantee toleration without compromise. Catholic Emancipation in 1829 and subsequent events ensured that the new conception of Catholicism entered the ascendant. The venerable tradition of Catholic scepticism should not for this reason be forgotten.

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CHAPTER 3

Ghosts and Apparitions in the English Catholic Community The idea that ghosts were tied to Catholicism was a recurring trope of Reformation polemic that became a lingering preoccupation in English culture. The origins of popular ghost beliefs in pre-Reformation Catholic culture are undeniable, and there is a good deal of evidence for the continuity of basic ghost beliefs from the Middle Ages into the early modern period.1 However, the post-Reformation Catholic community was not preoccupied with ghosts to a greater extent than anyone else in the population. The belief that they were thus preoccupied stemmed from a stereotyped view of Catholics as superstitious and obsessed with the macabre. Horace Walpole, in the fake ‘Translator’s Preface’ to The Castle of Otranto (1764), facetiously claimed that he had recovered the world’s first ‘Gothic’ novel from a book ‘in the library of an ancient catholic family in the north of England’.2 Ghost belief became synonymous with Catholicism, since without ghosts there was no purgatory and without purgatory there were no ghosts. Pre-Reformation England was imagined, in the words of Owen Davies, as ‘a golden age for ghosts’.3 Early modern ghost narratives were neither confined to nor derived from the Catholic community. Although they originated in a Catholic culture, they thrived in spite of Protestant attempts to suppress them. Ghosts were and are arguably the most resilient survivors of preReformation belief. Davies has demonstrated the non-denominational and peculiarly English character of ghost narratives, whilst Peter Marshall has shown that, contrary to popular belief, there was no necessary link between ghosts and purgatory.4 Sasha Handley has argued that ‘no simple dichotomy’ existed between Catholic and Protestant ghost narratives.5 Ghosts were so important to Protestants that, like it or not, those who self-consciously identified themselves as Catholics defined their identity 1

    3   4   5   2

Thomas (1991), pp. 701–4. Walpole, H., The Castle of Otranto (London, 1765 [1764]), p. iii. Davies (2007b), p. 104. Marshall (2002), p. 262. Handley (2007), p. 172.

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partly through their reactions to and use of ghost narratives. One way in which they did this was by refusing to identify ghosts as demons. By the eighteenth century, belief in ghosts was less controversial but it was not always taken seriously. By participating in ghost narratives, Catholics went against the grain of the Enlightenment, but by the nineteenth century, their contribution was valued in a world that delighted in the Gothic. In her study of eighteenth-century ghost beliefs, Handley has argued against a sharp distinction between fictitious ‘ghost stories’ and ghost narratives presented to the reader as true.6 However, she has insisted that popular ghost belief should be treated separately from elite clerical commentary, the ‘theology of ghosts’.7 In a study whose scope is, by definition, confessional, it is impossible to separate ideas about ghosts propounded by Catholics from experiences of ghosts that Catholics claimed to have. The question of whether Catholicism affected ghost narratives written by Catholics is the one at issue, and an a priori division of ‘popular’ ghost belief and learned interpretation does nothing to answer it. The theme of this chapter is ghost narratives produced by Catholics for Catholics; the consciously anti-Catholic ghost narrative, together with polemic designed to suppress ghost-belief, lies beyond its scope. Ghost narratives are not easy for the historian to find,8 and this problem is magnified when those narratives were produced by one small section of society. Elite-produced sources predominate, and this chapter does not pretend to be a comprehensive survey of all Catholic ghost narratives. Rather, it is an analysis of what we know of Catholic views of ghosts expressed directly in theological works and conveyed indirectly in a range of ghost narratives. The Early Modern Ghost Narrative Any study of ghost narratives must consider not only their content but also their relationship with an ever-changing and evolving genre of supernatural story. Studies by Ronald Finucane, Marshall and Handley, as well as a recent study of sixteenth-century French ghost stories by Timothy Chesters, do something to map out the landscape of the early modern ghost narrative. Chesters argues that in Catholic France, in addition to the role they played in arguments about purgatory, ghosts became an increasingly important element in stories about friendship, romance and

6

  Ibid., p. 8.   Ibid., p. 2. 8   Marshall (2002), p. 232. 7

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sexual secrets.9 The Swiss Protestant theologian Ludwig Lavater invented the idea of the haunted house as the theatre of a new ideological battle that saw Protestants attempt to seize spiritual control of domestic space. Lavater’s writings on this subject, and those of his Jesuit opponent Peter Thyraeus, inaugurated ‘pastoral demonology’.10 The sixteenth-century French theologian Noel Taillepied tried to categorize ghosts, noting that some asked for masses whilst others were simply troublesome, causing disturbances and loud noises at night. Ghosts usually appeared in their bodily likeness, and unlike evil spirits they did not bother with flattery or threats. Taillepied expected ghosts to speak or communicate in some way with those to whom they appeared, and on the whole adopted a functional view of ghosts: no ghost would appear from purgatory unless it had a reason to do so.11 Keith Thomas took over Taillepied’s functionalism, claiming that ghosts upheld moral standards and social norms, identified murderers, enforced wills and safeguarded the transfer of property and other obligations to dead ancestors.12 Finucane saw the didactic tendencies of sixteenth-century ghosts as a symptom of the fact that Protestant criticism of the doctrine of purgatory had suddenly made ghosts theologically relevant: ‘The dead were marshalled by the living in the great anti-Protestant battle.’ At the same time, the emphasis of ghost narratives changed from prodigious occurrences to interactions between ghosts and the living; ghosts became ‘more socially conscious’.13 The majority of Catholic theological writing on ghosts emanated from France, and no group in England was more likely to be open to crossfertilization from French narrative trends than Catholics. Nevertheless, it would be a distortion to suggest that English Catholics were dependent for their theology, still less for their approaches to popular narrative, on French models. Marshall has drawn attention to the prevalence of didactic ghosts, both before and after the Reformation and in both Protestant and Catholic sources.14 Ghosts might be ministers of the wrath of God, messengers on his behalf, or providential tormentors of the consciences 9   Chesters, T., Ghost Stories in Late Renaissance France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 15. 10   Ibid., pp. 15–16. For Chesters’s argument that Lavater invented the haunted house, see pp. 77–83. 11   Taillepied, N. (trans. M. Summers), A Treatise of Ghosts (London: Fortune Press, 1934 [Paris, 1616]), pp. 106–7, 167–8. On Taillepied, see Finucane, R.C., Appearances of the Dead: a cultural history of ghosts (London: Junction Books, 1982), pp. 101–3. 12   Thomas (1991), pp. 701–24. 13   Finucane (1982), p. 114. 14   Marshall (2002), p. 252.

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of malefactors. The relatively unchanged nature of ghost belief after the Reformation, in spite of theological fulminations against it, led Marshall to the conclusion that traditional beliefs, rather than theological needs, structured even learned discourse on ghosts.15 In the second half of the seventeenth century, whilst remaining didactic, ghosts underwent yet another transformation. Ghosts still often issued dire warnings and made prophetic utterances, but those who recorded apparitions often did so for the purposes of a self-conscious demonstration of the existence of life after death.16 Joseph Glanvill was perhaps the most celebrated example of a scholar of the supernatural with an overt philosophical agenda.17 The seventeenth-century dead ‘were concerned with ongoing trivial social and familial problems’. In Finucane’s view, the disappearance of the ‘purgatorial matrix’ allowed ghosts truly to reflect the anxieties of those who saw them. Most seventeenth-century ghostseers were acquainted with the deceased, in contrast to the anonymous apparitions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.18 Furthermore, seventeenth-century polemicists keen to demonstrate the existence of ghosts were prepared to make use of narratives from Catholic as well as Protestant sources, such as John Bromhall in his Treatise of Specters (1658). There is no evidence to suggest that Catholics were particularly concerned that members of their own church would lose their faith in God if they lost their faith in spirits. Catholic belief in ghosts remained stable throughout the seventeenth century, in contrast to belief amongst learned Protestants. The principal change was not an alteration in beliefs about what ghosts were, but the decline of the polemical ghost who existed to prove a theological point; to this extent the Catholic community paralleled the Protestant establishment. English Catholic Commentary on Ghosts Shane McCorristine has observed that, when it came to explaining ghosts, ‘Catholic commentators had the luxury of falling back on both scriptural precedents and a dogma which generally legitimized the existence of ghosts as souls of the dead.’19 It should come as a surprise, therefore, that discussions of ghosts are notably absent from the many books printed on the Continent for the English mission, with a few rare exceptions. When 15

    17   18   19   16

Ibid., p. 254. Finucane (1982), pp. 144–5. Glanvill, J., Saducismus Triumphatus (London, 1680). Finucane (1982), p. 150. McCorristine (2010), p. 30.

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one considers the psychological impact on English Catholics of constant accusations of superstition and credulity, however, it is understandable that they should have avoided indirectly endorsing anti-Catholic claims by dwelling on the supernatural. As Alison Shell has observed, Catholic authors did not defend the superstitions of the unlearned and indeed they were just as likely as Protestant controversialists to be embarrassed by the beliefs of those less educated than themselves.20 William (later Cardinal) Allen made a few cautious and circumspect remarks on the subject of the returning dead in his Defense and Declaration of the Catholike Churches Doctrine touching Purgatory (1565).21 This was by no means the only Catholic work on the subject of purgatory, but the others left the issue of ghosts untouched.22 One reason for this was the warning in the twenty-fifth session of the Council of Trent’s decree concerning purgatory (1563) that ‘those things that are not certain’ should not be preached to the laity. Likewise, bishops were encouraged to prohibit ‘those things which tend to a certain kind of curiosity or superstition’ as ‘scandals and stumbling-blocks of the faithful’.23 Ghosts fell into both categories. Allen declared that ‘Sometimes also, by the same force of the Spirite, the departed have appeared amongest the lieve’, and went on to give the ghost of Samuel as an example, remarking in parenthesis that some may find it ‘not convenient’ that ‘unlawfull artes’ could raise a man’s spirit. Moses, however, was certainly present at the transfiguration. Allen concluded: These rare and mervelous workes of god though they folow not the common order of nature, yet they be nether impossible, nor unpractised in Christes Churche … the common course and limites of manes matters, be of one sorte: and the woonderfull signes of goddes powre and vertue, of an other: the woorkes that naturally be wrought, are nothing like suche thinges, as mervailously and miraculously be done.

In other words, if God wanted to make ghosts appear, he could, although Allen’s insistence on the reality of Moses’ appearance on Mount Tabor 20 21

  Shell (2007), p. 70.   Allen, W., A Defense and Declaration of the Catholike Churches Doctrine

touching Purgatory (Antwerp, 1565), p. 110v. 22   Bristow, R., A Reply to Fulke, in Defense of M. D. Allens Scroll of Articles, and Booke of Purgatorie (Louvain, 1580); Higgons, T., The First Motive of T. H. … touching the Question of Purgatory, and Prayer for the Dead (1609); Floyd, J., Purgatories Triumph over Hell (St Omer, 1613). 23   Waterworth, J. The Canons and Decrees of the Sacred and Oecumenical Council of Trent (London: Dolman, 1848), p. 233.

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made him rather more than an agnostic on ghosts, as Marshall suggested.24 Allen’s writings had a lasting influence on the Catholic community. They were still being read more than a century and a half later when Thomas Rookwood of Stanningfield wrote a lengthy entry on Allen in his personal bio-bibliography, mentioning his book on purgatory along the way. It was clear that the book did not just sit gathering dust in Rookwood’s library – he had actually read it.25 The Council of Trent’s caution is evident in Gregory Martin’s commentary to his 1582 translation of the New Testament, warning against excessive curiosity concerning the state of the dead, even the saints:26 ‘If the damned had care of their frendes alive how & for what cause soever, much more have the Saincts and saved persons … Man must not for al that be curious to searche how the soules of the deceased expresse their minds, and be heard of one another, and so fall to blasphemie.’ Allen’s and Martin’s views were largely followed by the compilers of the annotations to the Douai-Rheims Bible (1609). Here, in a brief discussion of the ghost of Samuel, the commentators echoed Allen’s caution: ‘It is not defined nor certaine, whether the soul of Samuel appeared, or an evill spirit tooke his shape.’ However, the commentators reached their own conclusion that Saul’s spirit really did appear (albeit by divine permission rather than by necromancy):27 As for the Protestantes denying, that soules once parted from their bodies, can appeare to anie alive, S. Augustin confuteth them, both by this example of Samuel, supposing the booke of Ecclesiasticus to be Canonical Scripture, and of Moyses being dead, and Elias living (whom they hold also to be dead) both appearing with Christ in his transfiguration.

Whether later authors considered that Allen and the Douai-Rheims had said the last word on the issue, or missionary priests were inculcated with the cautious approach of the Council of Trent, English Catholic theologians wrote little more on the subject of ghosts. This fact apparently demonstrates dramatically the gap between Protestant polemic and reality; 24

  Marshall (2002), p. 236.   CUL Hengrave MS 77/1. Many of the early Catholic works in the library

25

at Coldham Hall may have found their way there with Jesuit chaplains, including John Gerard whom the Rookwoods sheltered from 1589–91 (Gerard, J., The Autobiography of an Elizabethan (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1951), pp. 24–31). 26   Martin, G. (trans.), The New Testament of Iesus Christ (Rheims, 1582), p. 187. 27   The Holie Bible faithfully translated into English … by the English College of Doway (Douai, 1609–10), vol. 1, pp. 631–2.

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preachers frequently asserted that belief in ghosts was a reason (and even the main reason) why Catholics believed in purgatory.28 However, the absence of works on ghosts generated by English Catholics does not mean that they did not consider ghosts important. The significance that ghosts had for illiterate Catholics in counties like Lancashire, where the Reformation was stalling in Elizabeth’s reign, is impossible to recover from beneath the layers of Protestant polemic against the ignorance of papists. However, the fact that Protestant polemicists took the trouble to attack Continental works by Le Loyer and Taillepied suggests that educated Catholics were making use of these works.29 A further Catholic commentary on ghosts was provided by Thomas Lodge in The Divel Conjur’d (1596), which consisted of a dialogue set in the fourth century between a hermit named Anthony, a philosopher named Metrodorus, a magician named Asterius and an Indian visitor, Frumentarius. The setting of the dialogue at a time before religious controversy between Christians allowed Lodge the freedom for a degree of theological speculation. Through the mouthpiece of Anthony, Lodge denied the possibility that the soul of a dead man could possess or animate a body or that a ghost could appear as a devil, since ‘according to corrected doctrin’ the bodiless substance of a soul could not be transformed into the complete incorporeal nature of an evil spirit.30 This argument, which seems to rely on something like the Scholastic distinction between a separated substance (a spirit) and a composite substance (the soul and body of a man), can be taken to the conclusion that the souls of the dead are incapable of any agency; it is perhaps significant that the Catholic Lodge declined to make this claim. On the other hand, it was well-established Catholic teaching that only an evil spirit could re-animate a corpse.31 Lodge affirmed the popular belief that the body of a victim would bleed in the presence of a murderer, although he expressed doubt as to whether such phenomena ‘are to be ascribed to divine miracle, or to natures power, or to devils working’.32 Lodge did not deny the existence of ghosts, but he emphasized the activity of evil spirits as more significant. Protestants were as reliant as Catholics on Continental works of demonology, most notably Ludwig Lavater’s Of Ghostes and Spirites 28   For a summary of the Protestant polemic and a list of relevant works, see Marshall (2002), p. 235. 29   See Le Loyer, P., IIII Livres des Spectres ou Apparitions et Visions d’Esprits, Anges et Demons se monstrans sensiblement aux Hommes (Paris, 1586); Taillepied (1934 [1616]). 30   Lodge, T., The Divel Conjur’d (London, 1596), p. 20. 31   Caciola (1996), pp. 10–13. 32   Lodge (1596), p. 31.

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Walking by Nyght, translated by Robert Harrison in 1572. Lavater put forward the view that a small number of apparitions were the direct work of the devil, whilst the remainder were either impostures or cases of mistaken identity. In 1605, an English translation of Le Loyer appeared, by the Protestant Zachary Jones, who dedicated it to King James ‘Because your Maiestie hath heretofore most religiously and learnedly written of this Argument’.33 However, Jones’s Treatise of Specters contained only the first book of Le Loyer’s four, which cautioned against excessive credulity. In May Yardley’s view, Jones was a hack writer who simply did not bother to read the rest of Le Loyer’s text and thus, unawares, ‘hardly realized that he was bringing the serpent into the garden’.34 However, it is just as likely that Jones deliberately omitted the rest of the book, since he was fully aware of its doctrinal implications. Robert Parsons came very close to the standard Protestant view that ghosts were demonic when he mocked William Barlow’s use of the ‘bold metaphor’ of sacrificing to the manes of Elizabeth in a tribute to the late Queen. Parsons drew attention to the irony of a Protestant minister who was prepared to sacrifice to evil spirits but denied prayer for and to the holy dead: ‘As for his heathen profane sacrificing to the Manes or Hob-goblins of his late Lady, I confesse it is an office fitter for a Protestant-Minister, that thinketh it unlawfull to pray for her soule, to deale with her Manes, or infernall spirites, then with Celestiall, by praying for her to Saints.’35 Parsons took care to identify the manes as infernal ghosts, whereas the spirits of saints are ‘supernal’, and turned his rejection of Barlow’s metaphor into a Counter-Reformation attack on the invocation of pagan mythology as a whole.36 Although Parsons’s point was primarily rhetorical, it reveals an underlying unwillingness on his part to acknowledge the existence of a ‘middle realm’ of the supernatural between the heavenly and the demonic. In 1613, a Catholic calling himself ‘A. B.’ translated a treatise on the works of divine providence by the Flemish theologian Leonard Lessius (1554–1623), entitled De Providentia Numinis ‘On the Providence of the Divine Spirit’. ‘A. B.’ re-titled the work Rawleigh his Ghost, deploying the conceit that the ghost of Sir Walter had instructed him to make Lessius’s work known to the English public. However, Lessius himself had plenty to say on the subject of ghosts and put forward the orthodox Catholic view that ghosts were genuinely the souls of the dead: ‘For it is evident even by 33

  Le Loyer, P. (trans. Z. Jones), A Treatise of Specters (London, 1605), ‘Epistle Dedicatorie’ (unpaginated). 34   Yardley, M., ‘The Catholic Position in the Ghost Controversy of the Sixteenth Century’ in Lavater (1929), pp. 221–51, at p. 226. 35   Parsons (1612), p. 161. 36   Ibid., p. 166.

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infinite examples, that the dead have been raised up, and that the Soules of the dead have returned from the places, wherein they were, and have appeared to the living.’37 The most radical Catholic commentary of all on ghosts and apparitions was provided by Thomas White in the course of his attempts to rid the doctrine of purgatory of what he saw as its ‘superstitious’ accretions. In 1659, White’s Villicationis suae de Medio Animarum Statu (1653) was translated as The Middle State of Souls. Later that year, his pupil John Sergeant published a short treatise critical of some of White’s conclusions, A Vindication of the Doctrine contained in Pope Benedict xii his Bull (1659). In 1661, White published Devotion and Reason, which was intended as a reply to the Jesuit James Mumford’s Remembrance for the Living to Pray for the Dead (1641). White specifically attacked as superstitious Mumford’s use of apparitions and miracles to demonstrate the corporeality of the soul in purgatory.38 In 1662, the Congregation of the Index condemned The Middle State of Souls, and this was followed by condemnation by Parliament in October 1666, amid fears that its pernicious doctrines might have provoked the divine wrath that caused the Great Fire of London.39 It is easily forgotten that, whilst condemning ideas particularly offensive to Protestants such as the efficacy of the mass to redeem souls from purgatory, White actually defended a modified form of the doctrine of purgatory and argued that the more fantastical stories used to bolster the doctrine in reality undermined it: ‘Such inventions were either designed, or, of their own nature, tend to the vilifying the belief of all Purgatory pains.’40 White denied the existence of material fire in purgatory and the possibility that the living could do anything to expiate a soul’s suffering there. He argued that the soul’s guilt alone torments it in the interval between death and judgement. However, purgatory retained for White its essential theological function as a home for the souls of those unworthy, as yet, of heaven.41 White’s soteriology was thoroughly Tridentine and his view of justification by faith and works required the existence of a ‘middle state’.

37

  Lessius, L. (trans. ‘A.B.’), Rawleigh his Ghost [De Prouidentia Numinis] ([St Omer], 1631), p. 377. 38   White, T., Devotion and Reason. Wherein modern devotion for the dead is brought to solid principles and made rational (Paris, 1661), p. 61. 39   Tutino, S., Thomas White and the Blackloists: Between Politics and Theology during the English Civil War (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), p. 135. 40   White, T., The Middle State of Souls from the Hour of Death to the Day of Judgment (London, 1659), p. 107. 41   White’s views on purgatory should be understood in the context of Digby’s earlier arguments concerning the immutability of the soul after death (see Almond (1994), p. 70).

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White acknowledged that demand for stories of apparitions and visions of the dead in purgatory was so great that authors would inevitably adapt them to their purpose. He took to its logical conclusion Thomas Lodge’s earlier suggestion that disembodied spirits were incapable of agency, grounding his claims in Scholastic philosophy: ‘S. Thomas teacheth us, that separated souls are not active, because their proper & substantially united bodyis the sphere of their activity, and the instrument by which they move other things, and they were Angels, if they could work upon separated bodies.’42 Kenelm Digby had reached much the same conclusion in 1644, arguing that the state of the soul in the afterlife would be whatever the soul’s state was when a person died. Digby, however, was prepared to qualify his theory and defer to theologians: Yet is it not my mind to say, that by the course of the universall resolutions, from which she is not wholy exempt, and from supernaturall administration of corporeall thinges, there may not result some change in her. But the consideration of that matter, I remitt to those treatises, unto which it belongeth.43

White, as the former rector of the English College at Lisbon and one of the leading theologians of his generation, had no such qualms. Ghost stories undermined the holiness of the souls in purgatory, and true believers in the doctrine had no need of ‘these fables, which lead to errour’.44 White then put forward a strikingly rationalistic psychological explanation for ghosts and other apparitions. Apparitions could be divided into two categories; those that appeared to the waking and those that appeared to dreamers in sleep. In the case of waking apparitions, defective sight, illness, or ‘long continued grief’ could explain them away. ‘It be not altogether impossible,’ White observed, ‘that a meer preoccupation of mind may work that effect.’45 He suggested that sensory deprivation could lead the inhabitants of the ‘phantasy’ to be presented as external realities, whilst acknowledging that ‘All cannot rationally be deny’d, nor all promiscuously admitted.’ White took the view that when the mind is most empty, memory and imagination assume reality for the dreamer. He confessed that when he was younger, he had visions of the Last Judgement in his sleep that exceeded anything he had ever seen or imagined when awake. White’s ultimate conclusion concerning ghosts was that they were the creations of the human mind in extreme grief: ‘I am apt to believe 42

  White (1659), pp. 105–6.   Digby, K., Two Treatises in the one of which the Nature of Bodies, in the

43

other, the Nature of Mans Soule is looked into (Paris, 1644), pp. 444–5. 44   White (1659), pp. 107–8. 45   Ibid., p. 189.

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that most of our stories of souls freed from their punishments … if they were examin’d to the bottom would be found to proceed from the frequent cogitation, and passionate affection of the living towards their departed Friends.’46 White’s views were certainly controversial, yet it may be an exaggeration to see him as one of the principal standard-bearers of scepticism in the seventeenth century;47 he was certainly a lesser known ‘Saducee’ than Thomas Hobbes and his scepticism was far less thoroughgoing. The political circumstances of White’s life, rather than his views on spirits, ensured that (with rare exceptions) his ideas could have no further life within the Catholic community.48 His reluctance to endorse popular Continental ideas about purgatory continued to resonate with English Catholics, constantly beset by false accusations that they were obsessed with promoting them. Ghosts and Purgatory The accusation that the Catholic clergy were involved in the faking of ghosts and apparitions in order to prove the existence of purgatory was an old one that derived from Erasmus’s colloquy Exorcism and the Spectre in which a priest put candles on the backs of crabs and set them loose in the churchyard on Easter Eve.49 At the Reformation, the former Carmelite John Bale (1495–1563) turned Erasmus’s anecdotal satire into visceral antiCatholic polemic, claiming that priests made the dead seem to speak,50 and Archbishop Edmund Grindal claimed in 1564 that the doctrine of purgatory was ‘maintained principally by feigned apparitions, visions of spirits, and other like fables’.51 Many Protestants assumed that people only believed in ghosts because they had been taught to do so by the Catholic church, which needed ghosts in order to prove the existence of purgatory. The possibility that it was the other way round (that is, the doctrine of purgatory allowed the church to accommodate ‘folkloric’ beliefs that people held anyway) did

46

  Ibid., p. 196.   Bath and Newton (2006), p. 4. 48   On Charles Dodd’s revival of ‘Blackloist’ political opinions in the eighteenth 47

century, see Glickman (2009), pp. 134–5. 49   Erasmus (trans. C.R. Thompson), Colloquies (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1965), pp. 231–7. 50   Davies (2007), p. 166. 51   Grindal, E. (ed. W. Nicholson), The Remains of Edmund Grindal (Cambridge: Parker Society, 1843), p. 24.

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not occur to controversialists.52 Consequently, they were puzzled when the triumph of Protestantism failed to do away with ghost belief. All of the evidence we have for priests counterfeiting apparitions derives from hostile sources,53 the most painstaking of whom was John Gee (1595/6–1639). Gee was a clergyman who had enjoyed recusant patronage and considered converting to Catholicism, until the collapse of a building in which he was hearing Vespers in 1623 exposed Gee’s attendance and led the Archbishop of Canterbury, George Abbott, to ask embarrassing questions about his conduct. Gee turned what was ostensibly a career disaster to his advantage by publishing The Foot out of the Snare (1624) in which he ‘named and shamed’ the missionary priests whom he had got to know in London and exposed their supposed fraudulent dealings.54 This was quickly followed by New Shreds of the Old Snare in which Gee claimed to expose the Jesuit strategy of faking apparitions. Unlike previous polemics, Gee included names, dates and other details rather than just generalized slurs. According to Gee, in 1621, a Protestant girl named Mary Boucher or Butcher entered into the service of a recusant lady in London and, in spite of assurances given to her mother that no pressure would be applied to her to change her religion, she found herself the subject of aggressive proselytism by three Jesuits.55 The priests attempted to convince her that Protestantism was the work of the devil, that they had the power to work miracles, and that she should become a nun.56 Distressed, Mary took to her bed, giving the Catholics an opportunity to attempt the counterfeit apparition:57 There comes into the chamber one M[ist]ris Vause, a great Recusant, and asked her how shee did, and then came to her and did with somewhat stroke or rub her forehead. After which time Mary Boucher felt her selfe very ill at ease and distempered in her head. And about an half-houre after M[ist]ris Vause was departed from her, shee heard her chamber dore open, and with that a great light flashed into the roome two or three times, which shee thought some bodie did by way of jest or merriment, to make her afraid. Whereupon shee called on them not to affright her, for that shee was not well. But forthwith came into the roome an apparition or shape as of a woman all in white, with countenance pale and wanne, with long tresses of haire hanging downe to her middle who 52

Marshall (2002), p. 234. Davies (2007), pp. 66–7. Harmsen, T., ‘Gee, John’ in DNB, vol. 21, pp. 715–16. Gee named the Jesuits as Fisher, Wainman and Ireland. These may have been John Fisher SJ (1608–54), the secular priest Christopher Wainman, and Alexander Ireland SJ (1604–52). See Bellenger, pp. 59, 118, 75. 56   Gee (1624), pp. 1–3. 57   Ibid., pp. 3–4.     54   55   53

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still made toward her; whereat this sicke woman was much afraid. But this visible approaching nearer to her, bad her not to feare; for that she came to her for her eternall good and happinesse. And with that the appearing woman began by degrees to remove with her hand the haire from her face, and asked this Mary whither shee knew who shee was; with that this distressed Mary looked earnestly on her, and then cryed out, Oh my God-mother, and would have gotten off from her bed to have asked her blessing. But the other bad her lye still and not stirre. And then touching her with a hand cold as earth or iron, asked her where is your mother, where is my husband, where are my children? And then told her shee was come from Purgatory, where she had long endured torture and torment. And shee came to tell her how shee her God-daughter should escape the same.

Not content with frightening Mary, the ghost then began to question her closely for half an hour about her religious beliefs, asking her how many sacraments there were and whether she believed in transubstantiation. Mary thought it strange that they were uninterrupted, since the place where she slept was usually used as a thoroughfare by the maids. Shortly after the ghost’s departure, Mistress Vaux entered Mary’s chamber, and when she heard what had taken place she assured Mary that it was a sign that she should become a Catholic. The ghost subsequently returned ‘above a dozen times’ and encouraged her to become a nun and to do anything that she was instructed by Mr Ireland.58 Gee made no attempt to explain away the apparition as a crude hoax, and indeed there is an insinuation of witchcraft in the observation that the ghost appeared to Mary after Mistress Vaux had rubbed her temples. When Gee visited Mary Boucher to hear her story for himself, he reported that ‘Shee thinketh in her conscience some of those things could not be done without Witchcraft, or some strange helpe by the devill.’59 Gee declined to offer his own comment on the possibility of witchcraft, and left it as innuendo. His reluctance to expose the physical or psychological origin of the ghost is a sign that he did not write in the sceptical tradition of Scot and Harsnett. Unfortunately, Gee’s story suffers from an internal contradiction. Mary’s godmother declared that she had no hope of seeing heaven if she was a Protestant, and yet her godmother had clearly been a Protestant herself. Mary’s mother objected to the portrayal of the godmother as being in purgatory, since ‘she was a woman so vertuous and religious, that it is not to be doubted but that shee is in heaven.’60 If Mary’s godmother was a Protestant, then the Jesuits could gain little by portraying her as a soul in purgatory. 58

  Ibid., pp. 3–6.   Ibid., p. 8. 60   Ibid., p. 6. 59

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In August 1623, two of the priests who had been involved in the Butcher case turned up again, this time at the house of a Surrey recusant who was playing host to a young woman named Frances Peard, who had come into a large fortune on the death of her parents. According to Gee, Christopher Wainman and John Fisher successfully converted Frances to Catholicism; they then decided to convince her to become a nun so that they could get their hands on her fortune. Wainman claimed that he received a visit from an apparition: Oh Mistris Francis, what a glorious sight did I behold the last night. At midnight being in my bed I lay awake and began to say over my Breviary, which I had no sooner done, but there appeared unto me a beautifull Virgin like your selfe, all in white, glittering like an Angell, and said unto me, Behold I am such a one, whom you being my ghostly Father perswaded to become a Nunne, and now I appeare to give you thanks. For since my departure out of this world, I raigne in glory with the Virgin Mary. All the tongues in the world cannot expresse that which I now possesse. There is a Gentlewoman you lately perswaded to become a Catholicke, M[ist]ris Francis Peard: Oh perswade her to the same life that I led in the heavenly Monasterie at Bruxells: Shee will without doubt be a good Saint. This visible having thus spoken unto Mr Wainman, It gave him (as he said) three Benedictions and vanished away.

Subsequently, the priests took Frances to London in order to hear a sermon recommending the religious life preached in Drury Lane. The following night she was visited by an apparition in her own right:61 There seemed to be a great light in her Chamber, which at the first beholding thereof astonished her, and then presently after appeared unto her, a shape like unto a woman all in white: from her face seemed to come little streames of fire, or glittering light. This Woman-shape first bad her not be afraid, for shee came to her with a message from heaven, and said her name was St Lucy, who being borne of honorable Parents, and of a great Familie, had great riches left unto her by her friends; which riches fearing least they should be an hinderance to her in the processe of godlinesse, she bestowed all upon the poore and lived a Monasticall life, by meanes whereof shee is now one of the most glorious Saints in heaven. And then said this crafty vision to the Gentlewoman, Doe you also dispose of those worldly things that you have to the poore, and toward religious Uses, and goe your wayes and live a religious life amongst the good company of Virgins at Bruxells, and so shall you be sure to be saved, and freed from the fire of Purgatory, which otherwise you cannot escape. And so this vision left her.

When the priests demanded money from Frances on various pretexts, she eventually realized that they were more interested in her money than her 61

  Ibid., pp. 10–13.

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soul. Then, ‘seriously weighing the particulars of the apparition presented to her in Drury lane, shee concluded it must needs be some jugling tricke devised by those Masters, and assisted by some in the house.’62 Gee made repeated use of theatrical metaphors for the Jesuits, describing them as ‘Players to the Popes Holines’.63 The ghost was a mere performance, ‘such cheating, shuffling, and Comicall an Engine’.64 Purgatory does seem to have played an important part in one Catholic ghost story that, if it was ever intended to serve an evangelistic purpose, actually ended up in the archives of the Carmelites of Lierre. This manuscript account of the haunting of the house of Charles Coleman of Cannock, Staffordshire in 1658 was entitled ‘A Relation of the Apparition of a Soul in Purgatory’ and written by William Atkins, Rector of the Jesuit College of St Aloysius (the Jesuit mission in the Midlands), based on the testimony of a 16-year-old Catholic serving maid, Anne Cherington.65 Two years earlier, Atkins had been involved in the exorcism of the house of a Mr Hall of Halfcote in Worcestershire,66 so he had a known interest in supernatural phenomena of this kind. It is possible that Atkins was not only the author of the Cannock narrative but also the exorcist involved. The haunting consisted of loud knockings and overturned furniture as well as the exposure of ‘the spirit’s last will and testament’ on a writing desk. Manifestations of the ghost in the form of knocking and other disturbances followed Anne around the house as if the spirit was trying to communicate with her. A priest was unable to make the spirit speak, but when Anne was left alone with the spirit she saw ‘a personable, grave man’ who fitted the description of her master’s father, John Coleman. Anne made sure that he was not an evil spirit by sprinkling him with holy water, and the spirit explained that because his son had not been to confession for four years, his own suffering in purgatory was increased. Furthermore, his son had left parts of Coleman’s will unperformed. Anne proceeded to question the spirit and discovered the reasons for some of the more unusual phenomena that had accompanied his appearances:

62

Ibid., p. 14. Ibid., p. 11. Ibid., p. 15. ‘A Relation of the Apparition of a Soul in Purgatory An[n]o [Domini] 1658 in the Months of January and February in the Town of Can[no]ck in Staff[ord] s[hire]’ in Hallett (2007b), pp. 160–65. The story was taken down by ‘William Atk.’; William Atkins SJ (1601–81) was the only priest of that name alive at the time and he was also an active exorcist (Bellenger, p. 35). 66   Foley, vol. 2, pp. 22–3.     64   65   63

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She asked him how long he had walked. He told her he had walked one whole year in the remote and old buildings, & one month and five days amongst them in the new. She asked him what some confused noises meant, as if a multitude of people had run up & down the rooms. He said that was also his enemy that ran before him wherever he went, & that his good angel always followed after him. She asked why he had not spoken his mind to the priest, not to his son, nor to her master Fleetwood when they had conjured him to speak. He said he had no power to open his mouth to them. She asked him why he made her beds, fetched up coals, & made her fires in the chambers. He answered that all [this] was to persuade her by good offices not to fear to speak to him.

This account combined purgatorial torment with a traditional ‘walking’ spirit and rationalized the unexplained noises in terms of a spiritual struggle. The phenomenon of the ‘good spirit’ who did the servant’s work, which others might have associated with the fairies, became the work of a holy soul in purgatory. Once the son’s behaviour had improved, the spirit of John Coleman returned, this time ‘in great brightness’ and accompanied by small angelic creatures holding wax tapers. Anne had another opportunity to question the ghost, and asked him if Protestants could be saved: ‘He bade her [to] be constant to the Catholic Church for there was no hope of salvation out of it.’ Anne asked him what became of Protestants after they died: ‘He answered that, though the mercies of God were great, their ignorance would not excuse them.’ The ghost added that Protestant ministers ‘lie deeper in hell than the people, because commonly they know the truth and teach amiss’.67 The warnings against Protestantism and the emphasis on the importance of confession in the Cannock narrative could suggest that it was intended as a piece of Catholic evangelistic propaganda. More likely, however, is that it was aimed at Catholics and was intended to warn them against backsliding and occasional conformity. Not all encounters with apparitions were as terrifying as Anne Cherington’s. In the late sixteenth century, the young Frances Burrows, later to become an Augustinian canoness at Louvain, opened the door at her home in Leicestershire to see ‘a man clothed in woollen cloth, all in white’, who ‘looked cheerfully upon her’ but whose language she did not understand. Many years later, Frances realized that the man was wearing the habit of an Augustinian friar, and took this to have been a sign of her own destiny.68 Margaret Mostyn was the object of a ghost’s attention for quite different reasons; not long after her profession as a Carmelite nun at Lierre in the 1640s, she heard her name being spoken when she was in choir or in her cell, but she was too frightened to tell anyone else about it. 67 68

  Hallett (2007b), pp. 163–4.   Hamilton (1904), vol. 2, pp. 167–8.

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At length, her confessor instructed her to speak to the spirit, so she was allowed to sleep ‘in the upper choir before the Blessed Sacrament’ along with the Prioress and another nun. Between midnight and one o’clock, she was called as before, and this time said the words ‘In the name of God, if you are able, show what you would have.’ Instead of a departed soul, she saw the apparition of a book with her own name in it. Margaret remembered that, when she was still in England, the maid who used to dress her every day had extracted a promise from her that she would say fifteen rosaries for her when she died, and had her sign the promise in her prayer book. Margaret finally fulfilled her promise and the next night she saw the maid ‘under a curious apple tree, and appeared as green as the tree, where, making a bow in sign of thanks, she grew all white, and so vanished’. The significance of the apple tree was that the maid had died from eating green fruit.69 There is little evidence from Catholic sources that missionary priests were interested in proving the existence of purgatory to Protestants by means of ghosts, fake or otherwise. It was far from agreed among Catholic theologians that a soul could return from purgatory as a ghost, and priests were more concerned with imparting the basics of the faith than encouraging the faithful to take sides in an abstruse controversy. However, belief in purgatory was sufficiently powerful among Catholics to make them part with their money. In the 1670s, a Catholic widow asked the Carmelite Bede Travers to stay in her house in order to carry out an exorcism. He duly stayed in the affected bedroom, spending the night in prayer, and heard some knocking coming from the corner. Afterwards, the woman claimed to have seen a vision of her husband’s spirit, who told her that a certain amount of money was left unpaid to creditors at his death which needed to be repaid if he was to enter heaven. The woman’s friends, and Travers himself, contributed their own money in payment of the debts, and the woman subsequently claimed to have had a vision of her husband in glory. Travers was suspicious, however, and having investigated he found that the husband died with no debts and no tradesman had been paid a penny. The woman admitted she had been driven to the deception by financial desperation.70 This story could have come from the pages of an anti-Catholic author like John Gee, and the fact that it was instead recounted by Bede Travers demonstrates the extent to which the Carmelite was prepared to acknowledge the potential for the abuse of beliefs like purgatory among the faithful. In the eighteenth century, Alban Butler (1710–73) cautioned against belief in visions of the saints and the holy 69

  Hallett (2007b), pp. 56–7.   Zimmerman, B., Carmel in England (London: Burns and Oates, 1899),

70

p. 256.

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souls in purgatory, and insisted that apparitions could take place only as a special providence of God. Communications between the living and the dead could not be initiated by the living but only by God himself. Unlike earlier commentators, Butler assumed that only holy souls would appear; thus he implicitly rejected the idea that the souls of the damned could return to haunt the earth:71 Nor does sacred Authority any where insinuate that the souls of Blessed Saints assist us ordinarily any other Way than by praying for us, &c. I say ordinarily, for we cannot deny extraordinary Warnings to have been sometimes received by that special Order of Providence, in Visions of just departed Souls; nor does it seem impossible, but some holy Souls may, by a like extraordinary Appointment of God, communicate Thoughts to living Minds on Earth, but such Effects fall not under the ordinary Course of Providence, and depend not on the mere Will of any Souls.

In Handley’s view, Butler was ‘markedly circumspect’ in his attitude to ghosts, a reflection of his awareness of the need to test phenomena empirically.72 However, Butler’s circumspection is less likely to have derived from his attitude to natural philosophy than an older Counter-Reformation caution. Butler suggested not that ghosts were implausible, but that ‘sacred Authority’ did not endorse every superstition people might entertain about them. Handley’s suggestion that Butler’s remarks reflected a ‘diluted emphasis upon purgatory’ among eighteenth-century Catholics presupposes that Catholics deployed ghost stories to defend purgatory up to that point – a view for which evidence is singularly lacking outside of Protestant polemic. The belief that Catholics were obsessed with purgatory lingered into the eighteenth century. According to the Protestant controversialist Zacchary Taylor, one of the questions posed to a demoniac by the Jesuit Robert Brooke in 1696 concerned the reality of purgatory and the efficacy of prayers for the dead.73 In March 1688, it was reported that some Papists ‘pretended that the Ghost of a Person, buried some Time since, walk’d and appear’d to some, declaring it could not rest, until it was buried under the Pulpit in St Clement’s Church’. The coffin of the deceased, when opened, turned out to be full of ‘Fire-balls, and other Combustibles’.74 This story 71   Butler, A., The Moveable Feasts, Fasts and other annual Observances of the Catholic Church (London, 1774), pp. 157–8. 72   Handley (2007), p. 171. 73   Taylor, Z., The Devil Turn’d Casuist (London, 1696), p. 5. 74   Revolution Politicks: being a compleat Collection of all the Reports, Lyes and Stories, which were the Fore-runners of the Great Revolution in 1688 (London, 1733), part 5, p. 3.

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brought together two anti-Catholic obsessions: Catholics as ghost-fakers and Catholics as arsonists. Even in 1762, Jesuits were half-seriously suspected of involvement in the infamous ‘Cock Lane’ ghost.75 However, for educated Catholics, the association of purgatory with ghosts was something of an embarrassment. English Catholic writers on purgatory made no mention of ghosts, and even many Continental authors steered clear of them.76 Protestants were troubled by the continuing importance of ghosts in people’s lives; blaming Catholics for this externalized the phenomenon and made them feel better. Oral Traditions A wealth of oral traditions exists concerning ghosts in Catholic houses haunting Catholic families, especially in the north of England. However, the interest in ghosts and haunting that blossomed in the Victorian period has rendered oral traditions an unreliable guide to what Catholics actually believed about ghosts before Emancipation. Michael Hodgetts has observed that the novels of Sir Walter Scott ‘encouraged a deep-rooted credulity’ concerning underground passages and hiding places in houses associated with a Catholic past, ‘which hindered a just appreciation of the authentic historical examples’.77 The Victorian quest for romance led to the creation and invention of numerous so-called ‘priest-holes’ in old houses, and the history of ‘penal times’ was fertile ground for titillating Gothic speculations. Catholic ghosts encountered the same fate as Catholic houses, and were elaborated and invented by Catholics and non-Catholics alike. In the Victorian version of Samlesbury Hall’s ghost story, the Southworths’ Catholicism took centre stage. John Southworth’s ‘rigid devotion to the faith of his ancestors’ caused him to forbid his daughter to marry a Protestant. Her brother subsequently killed his sister’s lover and two of his friends and she was ‘sent abroad to a convent where she was kept under strict surveillance’ and went mad. The story thus pleasingly united the theme of Catholic bigotry with the myth of imprisoned nuns, but it is more than likely that the tradition did not pre-date the discovery of three skeletons outside the walls of the hall in the nineteenth century.78 75

Davies (2007b), p. 167. Marshall (2002), p. 242. Hodgetts (1989), pp. 223–4. Ingram, J.H., Haunted Homes and Family Legends of Great Britain (London: W.H. Allen and Co., 1891), pp. 544–7. See also stories related to Ince Hall (pp. 502–6), Calverley Hall (pp. 394–402), Lostock Tower (pp. 517–19) and Wardley Hall (pp. 602–6).     77   78   76

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On a visit in the 1940s to Ince Blundell in Lancashire, the home of the Blundells, Archbishop David Matthew found that ‘the conversation feathered round the ghost at Ince, where Charles Blundell was still reported to drag his lame-leg on the stone-flagged passage.’ Significantly, a specifically Catholic interpretation was attached to the ghosts of Ince by its twentieth-century inhabitants: ‘The ladies would aver that the ghosts were souls in purgatory demanding Masses.’ Similar stories circulated among the Smythes of Acton Burnell in Shropshire.79 The Protestant preoccupation with ghosts as the harbingers of purgatory had rubbed off on Catholics themselves. The confident Catholicism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries recruited ghosts as representatives of a heroic past under construction in the works of R.H. Benson, Dom Bede Camm and others.80 The very existence of ghosts witnessed against the Reformation and the folly of giving up masses for the dead. The folklorist Jessica Lofthouse argued that the tales of white, black and grey ladies and/or monks that she encountered in many old Lancashire houses were concealed or forgotten memories of missionary priests. They were either invented as cover, ‘to account for whisperings, rustlings, footsteps by night and dark-hooded figures hastening down passages or lonely paths’, or else they were a good indication of the existence of hiding places in the rooms or corridors they were supposed to haunt.81 Tellingly, however, Lofthouse acknowledged that ‘Many [stories] are forgotten, only to be revived when modern improvements to old property uncover secret rooms.’82 The ‘revival’ of oral tradition usually meant the invention of romantic stories to suit unusual discoveries. Chingle Hall in Lancashire was supposed to be haunted by the martyr St John Wall in his friar’s habit – but only after the owners discovered ‘a hidden recess’.83 Stories of ‘family curses’, although they derive ultimately from the rhetoric of sacrilege familiar to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century

79

  Leslie, S., Shane Leslie’s Ghost Book (London: Hollis and Carter, 1955),

p. 56. 80

  See Benson, R.H., Come Rack! Come Rope! (London, 1912); Camm, B., Forgotten Shrines (London: MacDonald and Evans, 1910); Hamilton (1904), vol. 1, p. 182 (the ghost of Huddington Hall). Benson and a number of non-Catholic writers drew on the romance of old Catholic houses for fictional ghost stories; see Griffiths, R., The Pen and the Cross: Catholicism and English Literature 1850–2000 (London: Continuum, 2010), pp. 188–99. 81   Lofthouse, J., North-Country Folklore: in Lancashire, Cumbria and the Pennine Dales (London: Robert Hale, 1976), p. 90. 82   Ibid., p. 99. 83   Ibid., p. 101.

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antiquaries,84 were essentially a Victorian creation. Catholic families were not exempt from such curses since they, too, were often the impropriators of monastic lands. Elliott O’Donnell told an elaborate story of a monastic curse on the Brownes of Cowdray and Battle (Viscounts Montagu),85 whose less fantastic elements were derived from an updated edition of Sir Henry Spelman’s History and Fate of Sacrilege.86 O’Donnell later added a spectral element to the story, reporting that a monk was occasionally seen playing the organ who would then prophesy doom to the owner of the house.87 The idea that curses might manifest themselves as ghosts derived ultimately from the ballad ‘Beware! Beware! of the Black Friar’ in Canto XVI of Byron’s Don Juan (1823).88 Other late stories are demonstrably types that passed from one family (or one house) to another. An example is Sir Henry Jerningham’s story of how Lord Stourton spoke to a monk in the library at Costessey Hall in Norfolk, who could not rest until someone destroyed a confession written in a certain book; this had an almost exact parallel in a story concerning Bishop Samuel Wilberforce’s visit to Slindon Hall, near Arundel.89 A phenomenon that is found in several English counties but especially in the north is the preservation of so-called ‘screaming skulls’, several of which have stories attached to them that refer to Catholicism. Some were supposedly relics of martyred missionary priests associated with the family or the locality. The tradition that any attempt to move or displace them will bring misfortune on the house and the family and provoke poltergeisttype activity (as at Browsholme and Wardley Halls in Lancashire) seems to be a relatively recent tradition.90 There are some traditions that may be older, like the story recorded by Joseph Gillow concerning ‘The Gory Head of Mowbreck Hall’, an apparition witnessed by Vivian Haydock, the father of the martyr George Haydock (executed in 1584), who became a priest in old age:91

84   For a discussion of sacrilege narratives, see Shell (2007), pp. 23–33. In the early modern period, sacrilege was associated with providential accidents rather than ghosts. 85   O’Donnell, E., Famous Curses (London: Skeffington and Son, 1929), pp. 111–17. 86   Spelman, H. (revised), The History and Fate of Sacrilege (London: Joseph Masters, 1853), pp. 295–6. 87   O’Donnell (1933), p. 59. 88   Byron, G., The Poetical Works of Lord Byron (New York: D. Appleton, 1850), p. 764. 89   Leslie (1955), p. 122. 90   Lofthouse (1976), pp. 121–2 (Browsholme); Camm (1910), p. 205. 91   Gillow, J., Haydock Papers (London: Burns and Oates, 1888), p. 25.

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On the hallowe’en preceding the arrest of his son George, Vivian Haydock stood, robed in his vestments, at the foot of the altar in the domestic chapel at Mowbreck, awaiting the clock to strike twelve. As the bell tolled the hour of midnight, the ‘fugitive’ beheld the decapitated head of his favourite son slowly rising above the altar, whose blood-stained lips seemed to repeat those memorable words: Tristitia vestra vertetur in gaudium (‘your sorrow will be turned to joy’).

Vivian Haydock died of shock at the apparition. A skull preserved by the Haydocks at Cottam Hall was supposed to be that of George Haydock.92 Although clearly elaborated by Gillow, and probably by others before him, the ‘gory head’ story does not fit into the standard pattern of skull-related tales and, indeed, it does nothing to explain why the skull of George Haydock ended up at Cottam. The story’s failure to make sense and conform to the usual pattern argues in favour of a long-standing oral tradition, although it is very unlikely that this reached as far back as the sixteenth century. Catholic Ghost Narratives of the Reformation Two of the earliest post-Reformation English Catholic ghost narratives arose from the spiritual anxieties of a besieged community, preoccupied with the challenge of staying faithful whilst often unable to receive the consolation of the sacraments. Unlike tales of exorcism, there is little evidence that they played a missionary role in convincing non-Catholics of the existence of purgatory. Instead, they provided reassurance for Catholics that purgatory was accessible to those who died without the last rites and those who remained ‘Catholic at heart’ even if circumstances forced them into outward conformity. They had the potential to serve an important pastoral role within the Catholic community, although we shall probably never know how common such stories were, since only a couple have survived. Richard Challoner recorded a story concerning the Jesuit John Cornelius (c. 1557–94) that apparently derived from a manuscript at the English College, Douai written by a Mr Manger. Cornelius and the server at his mass had a vision of John, 9th Baron Stourton (1553–88) shortly after the peer’s death:93

92 93

  Camm (1910), pp. 313–14.   Challoner, R., Memoirs of Missionary Priests and other Catholics of both

sexes that have suffered death in England on religious accounts, from the year 1577 to 1684 (Manchester, 1803 [1741]), vol. 1, p. 166.

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When Mr. Cornelius was saying mass for the soul of John lord Stourton (who had died unreconciled, but with great desire of the sacraments, and more than ordinary marks of sorrow and repentance) he had a vision, after the consecration and elevation of the chalice, of the soul of the said lord Stourton, then in purgatory, desiring him, to pray for him, and to request of the lady his mother to cause masses to be said for his soul. This vision was also seen at the same time, by Patrick Salmon, a good religious soul, who was then serving Mr. Cornelius at mass.

Lord Stourton had much to repent in Catholic eyes; he was one of the peers who sat in judgment at the trial of Mary, Queen of Scots.94 Cornelius was famed for his sanctity and he was the subject of numerous exorcism stories. Crediting the vision to him gave it particular significance, and the story served to reinforce the power of the mass at the same time as offering consolation to Catholics who, like Lord Stourton, were forced into impossible choices by the politics of Elizabethan England. Challoner’s story shares some similarities with the Jesuit John Gerard’s account of phenomena at the house of a Staffordshire gentleman who died in 1591 ‘with a great desire to confess’. Gerard described what happened next: Every night after his death his wife saw a kind of light flicker through the air in her room and enter past the bed-curtains. In her fright she ordered her maidservants to bring their own beds into her room and stay with her during the night. But they saw nothing at all. Only the mistress saw it still every night and was very disturbed.

The widow made contact with a Catholic friend of her husband who in turn asked a priest for his opinion. The priest suggested that the light meant that the widow ‘should come to the light of the faith’. The woman duly became a Catholic and had mass said in the room, but the light continued to appear. The priest consulted other clergy whose collective conclusion was that ‘probably her husband was on his way to heaven (he had been a Catholic at heart and had wanted to receive the sacraments) but he still needed prayers for the purgation of his soul.’ Accordingly, the priests suggested that mass should be offered for the repose of his soul for thirty days. On the night after the last mass, ‘three lights appeared instead of the customary one, the outside two seeming to support the third between them. All three entered past the bed-curtains and after staying

94

  Collins, A., The Peerage of England (London, 1709), p. 366.

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a few moments they mounted heavenwards through the top coverings.’ Gerard interpreted the two supporting lights as angels.95 Far from being a didactic spectre that functioned to demonstrate the doctrine of purgatory, the Staffordshire ghost required interpretation in order to fit neatly within the Catholic missionary agenda. The fact that neither the ghost-seer nor her husband were technically Catholics was a potential problem, as a non-Catholic was unlikely to be in purgatory. This is probably why the first priest whom the widow consulted interpreted the apparition as a providential sign rather than a manifestation of the dead husband’s spirit. It is a testament to the potency of ghost belief that this proved an unsatisfactory explanation, and the second set of priests asked to interpret the phenomenon equivocated, perhaps in order to allow the only expiation acceptable to the grieving widow; the light was her husband’s soul, requiring deliverance from purgatory. The subsequent appearance of the additional ‘angelic’ lights allowed what was effectively a theological concession to be represented as a pious tale. By the time the spectre of John Coleman told Anne Cherington in 1658 that Protestants had no hope of entering heaven, attitudes had hardened. In 1612, the secular priest Edward Bennett reported in a letter to Thomas More a ghost story vouched for by ‘a vertuous preest’.96 A Lancashire gentleman’s daughter was sewing in the parlour when she heard three knocks next to her; she ran upstairs to her father, who was with a priest, and when they refused to believe her report they heard the three knocks for themselves. The young woman continued to hear the knocks and asked her confessor for advice; he suggested that she should speak to the spirit if it appeared. She was so afraid of this prospect that she prayed that if the spirit did appear, it would come in the form of a child. Her prayers were answered, and one day after hearing mass ‘it appeared in the likenes of a very affable child’, but she was still too afraid to speak to it. The apparition appeared a second time, ‘something more grimme then before’, and this time the young woman summoned up enough courage to speak: Blessing herself, she sayd in the name of god: what art thow: whereunto he awnswered he was a preest, & in his lif tyme he receaved money for saing masse, but not performed it, & that he had long appeared to an owld man at Rome, who would never speak unto hime: wherfor he was forced to sollicite her to have a masse sayd in satisfaction of his neglect.

95 96

  Gerard (1951), pp. 38–9.   Edward Bennett to Thomas More, 17 July 1612, in Questier, M. (ed),

Letters from the Archpresbyterate of George Birkhead (Cambridge: Royal Historical Society, 1998), pp. 178–9.

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In order to convince her that he was a genuine apparition, the ghost told her that she frequently said (in error) that priests were fortunate since they could absolve themselves. The young woman told the story to her confessor, who agreed to say a mass for the unquiet priest, and here she saw the final chapter of the vision: ‘The next morning saieing masse for hyme, she being present at consummation of the holy sacrifice the vision appeared unto her in the same form of a child, who went to the alter, thence ascending into the challice, mownted up to heaven, & after was never seene.’ The manifestation of the ghost of an adult in the form of a child was a rare but not unheard-of occurrence,97 although it was even rarer for a ghost to adapt its appearance to suit the psychological needs of the ghost-seer. This particular story, exchanged between priests, was not so much concerned with proving the reality of purgatory as with reinforcing the solemn duties of priests. Catholic Ghost Narratives of the Eighteenth Century In February 1735, George Tasburgh was at dinner at his home (Flixton Hall, in north-east Suffolk) with his wife Anna and neighbour Henry Bedingfield of Coulsey Wood. Not long before, but as yet unbeknownst to them, a wealthy London financier named Humphrey Burgoyne had been killed in an accident that left bruises to the head, neck and chest (probably a fall from a horse).98 Dinner was interrupted when one of the party noticed that a pair of ‘Mahoggany Slyders’ on the sideboard for the bottles of wine and port, which had been a present to George Tasburgh from ‘Numps’ (Burgoyne) bore a stain in the shape of ‘a parfect Busto of a man, with Head, neck and Breast, bruis’d’ as well as ‘a large B stain’d near the Rim’. This apparition or ‘death fetch’, far from leaving the party in terror, reassured them of Burgoyne’s ‘particular remembrance for the family’ and their immediate reaction was to commission a painter to draw ‘an exact copy of it with China ink upon vellum which we keep in a frame and Glass, and design by the first opportunity to send the originall to be ingrav’d on a Copper Plate at London’.99 The story was quickly transmitted 97   Marshall, P., Mother Leakey and the Bishop: A Ghost Story (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 5–6. 98   Humphrey Burgoyne, Esq. was buried in Bermondsey churchyard in 1735, leaving behind a fortune of £12,000 inherited by his daughter Nancy (Lysons, D., The Environs of London (London, 1792), vol. 1, pp. 551, 571). 99   Mary Tasburgh to Delariviere Gage, 23 February 1735, CUL Hengrave MS 88/3/90 (copy of a letter written by Henry Bedingfield to Francis Tasburgh of Bodney).

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to other Catholic families in East Anglia. Henry Bedingfield described it to George’s cousin, Francis Tasburgh of Bodney, whose wife Mary copied his letter to her sister Delariviere Gage, the mother of Sir Thomas Gage, 3rd Baronet of Hengrave, who had already received a second-hand account of ‘the wonderfull appearance at Flixton’. The somewhat domestic apparition of Humphrey Burgoyne in 1735 is one of the first examples of a new kind of ghost narrative in the Catholic community. These ghosts served no obvious pastoral or doctrinal purpose and came to reassure and comfort as much as to admonish and avenge. However, the impulse not only to share a ghost story but also to record and display the visual evidence suggests a conscious rejection of Enlightenment scepticism on the part of Henry Bedingfield and George Tasburgh in an age when apparitions were increasingly scoffed at; after all, the engraving of the apparition would presumably be visible to their non-Catholic visitors. Already, the two gentlemen had transgressed what Alison Shell has described as the social permission extended to the gentry to enjoy ghost stories, but not to endorse them.100 An apparition narrative recorded by Richard How of Apsley Guise in Buckinghamshire in a letter to his friend William How in 1745 bears at least one similarity to the Flixton story. According to How, a Catholic lady at a gathering close to the port of Edinburgh remarked that ‘King James’ (the Old Pretender) would weep tears of blood if he knew what a catastrophe he had brought on so many Catholic families. When she happened to glance at a portrait of the Old Pretender she saw three drops of blood on it, which left no mark on her handkerchief when she tried to wipe them off.101 Here, as in the Flixton tale, the supernatural apparition was not a traditional spectre but instead associated with a picture, as if uncanny appearances had been ousted from physical reality and relegated to the world of representations and images. The urge to record ghosts in pictorial form was not unique to the Tasburghs and Bedingfields. Coldham Hall, the Suffolk home of the Rookwood Gage family, was the scene of a ghost-sighting in October 1807 that was subsequently immortalized in a mezzotint. The Rookwood Gages were the successors of the Gages of Hengrave, uniting two of Suffolk’s Catholic dynasties. Following the death of Sir Thomas Rookwood Gage, 6th Baronet in 1798, Coldham was tenanted by a non-Catholic, General Hammond. Sir Thomas Gage, 7th Baronet, still a minor at the time, was brought up with his mother’s family at Claughton Hall in Lancashire.102 100

  Shell (2007), p. 39.   Handley (2007), p. 172. 102   Gage, J., The History and Antiquities of Suffolk: Thingoe Hundred 101

(London, 1838), p. 212.

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Figure 3.1 Mezzotint engraving of the ghosts of two nuns in the great hall at Coldham Hall, Suffolk (1807), CUL Hengrave MS 1/4, between fols 565 and 566. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. According to Sir Thomas’s younger brother John Gage, one night, ‘One of the servants, in a state of intoxication, had the misfortune to tumble in the hall whilst carrying the tray, and to excuse the smash he ran to his master, saying he had seen the two old nuns walk from their picture frames into the hall’.103 The ‘two old nuns’ were depicted in two portraits that, in 1807, hung at one end of the great hall at Coldham. This was not their original position; a 1737 inventory of Coldham Hall listed ‘on[e] picher of mrs Cary a nun 103   CUL Hengrave MS 1/4, interleaved between fols 565 and 566 (note in the hand of John Gage).

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full length & frame’, valued at 12 shillings, as hanging on the staircase.104 ‘Mrs Cary’ was probably Jane Cary, or Sister Frances of St Ignatius, who was the first subprioress of the Canonesses Regular of the Holy Sepulchre at Liege in 1642.105 By 1807, Frances Cary had evidently been joined by a portrait of another canoness and both had been moved to the great hall. The brief ghost story would be of little interest on its own had not Sir Thomas decided, at a later date, to have a mezzotint engraved depicting the apparition witnessed by others when he was still a boy. An inscription beneath the picture reads ‘The old hall at Coldham, Suffolk, as furnished by Gen[era]l Hammond with the appearance of the ghosts of the two old ladies seen there in October 1807’. The antiquary Edmund Farrer, who first saw the mezzotint in 1902, described it:106 The picture represents the interior of the hall, and is taken from the end opposite the entrance. The large open fireplace is on the right hand, with the tall bay window on the left. The walls are hung with pictures and old armour, and at the far end of the hall, and above the screen, are hanging the portraits of the two nuns, but walking down the length of the hall, in straight and parallel lines, are the figures of two females, both in most unusual costumes, but similar in design. These are supposed to represent the ghosts of the two ladies whose portraits are hanging above the screen.

The costume of the two ghosts, in bonnets and narrow farthingales with large white collars, resembles seventeenth century secular dress rather than nuns’ habits, and their garb differs considerably from that of the nuns in the portraits behind them. This curious feature of the mezzotint suggests that it was drawn according to very precise instructions or from an ‘eyewitness’ drawing. Illustrating ghosts was by no means an exclusively Catholic preoccupation. Lord Byron’s cousin Kitty Parkins sketched the ‘Goblin Friar’ of Newstead Abbey from memory in 1814,107 and ghosts from fiction (such as Hamlet’s father), mythology and the Bible were a popular theme of engravings and paintings in the 1780s and ’90s, as well as a theme of satirical cartoons.108 In the case of the Newstead ghost, the attempt 104

  CUL Hengrave MS 77/2, fol. 3.   Guilday, P., The English Catholic Refugees on the Continent 1558–1795

105

(London: Longmans Green, 1914), p. 392. 106   SRO(B) HD 526/1223/6. 107   Irving, W., Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey (Paris, 1835), p. 110. 108   For examples of the genre, see Myrone, M., Frayling, C. and Warner, M., Gothic Nightmares: Fuseli, Blake and the Romantic Imagination (London: Tate Publishing, 2006).

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to draw the ghost reflected a Romantic desire to get as close as possible to the supernatural. It is notable that in most satirical illustrations, the spectators were depicted in order to reinforce the Enlightenment message against credulity and superstition. This was not the case in the Coldham mezzotint. Although the story followed the pattern of elite ghost stories by attributing the sighting to an uneducated figure, there is no tumbling servant in the foreground or any other feature to suggest a satirical purpose. The Coldham mezzotint, like the proposed engraving of the ghost of Humphrey Burgoyne, seems to have been intended as a record of a ghost-sighting. We cannot know for certain what motivated Sir Thomas Gage to memorialize the apparition in the great hall at Coldham. However, the subsequent evolution of the story of the portraits there is instructive concerning the perils of reliance on oral tradition. In 1863, when Samuel Tymms visited Coldham, the two portraits had changed position. Tymms confidently declared that ‘The portraits of two nuns, over the entrance, represent Mrs. Carey, the Superior of the English Austin Nuns at Bruges; and Miss Jennings (the younger portrait), a connection of the Rookwood family.’109 Frances Cary had no connection with the English Convent in Bruges and I have been able to find no link between the Rookwood Gages and a Miss Jennings. It is likely that Tymms guessed that the nun was a canoness of Bruges on account of the fact that the Rookwood Gages sheltered the canonesses at Hengrave Hall between 1794 and 1802.110 In reality, the Cary portrait was much older. Tymms made no allusion to a ghost story connected with the pictures, but contributed an erroneous identity to at least one of the sitters. In 1869, the Rookwood Gages sold Coldham Hall and its entire contents were moved to Hengrave, now the main home of the family. In 1897, Hengrave in turn was sold and the two portraits appeared as lot 539 in the sale catalogue, described as ‘a pair of full length portraits “The Rev. Mother” (Mary More) last descendent of Sir Thomas More, and “A Sister”’.111 According to Farrer, Colonel Trafford-Rawson, who then owned Coldham, bought these portraits, which consequently returned to their original home. Farrer described them in 1908; both portrayed women in white habits with black hoods, with a crucifix hanging in the background on the left-hand side. The first (presumably Frances Cary) held a book in her right hand and rested her left on a skull, accompanied 109   Tymms, S., ‘Coldham Hall in Stanningfield’, Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology 3 (1863), pp. 299–310, at p. 308. 110   Young, F., ‘Mother Mary More and the Exile of the Augustinian Canonesses of Bruges in England: 1794–1802’, Recusant History, 27 (2004), pp. 86–102. 111   A Catalogue of the Whole of the Very Interesting and Historical Contents of Hengrave Hall, Bury St Edmunds (London: Hampton and Sons, 1897), p. 44.

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by the inscription, ‘Let Death and Judgment neer be out of thought, / For, O, behold to the last hour we’re brought’. The second figure held a book in both hands and was without the memento mori. Farrer noted that this second portrait ‘is always supposed to have been a Rokewood’.112 It was not until 1979 that the Coldham ghost story emerged as an oral tradition, albeit so garbled that it seems unlikely that it was stimulated by a rediscovery of the mezzotint and John Gage’s attendant commentary, or indeed Farrer’s research. Richard Duce, who had owned Coldham Hall since the 1950s, claimed that … on the walls were two cursed portraits, one believed to be Penelope and another of a mother superior which tradition said should never be taken down. During cleaning and decorating the portraits were moved along the picture rail but never removed from the wall, in case ill-luck should befall the household.113

The name ‘Penelope’, which was never borne by any member of the Rookwood family, probably arose from an erroneous association between Coldham Hall and Penelope Gage, the mother of Sir Edward Gage, 1st Baronet of Hengrave. The idea of ‘cursed portraits’ is reminiscent of the tales associated with skulls in other houses. Likewise, the somewhat anodyne consequence of disturbing the artefact (‘bad luck’) reflects contemporary formulations of sacrilege-type legends. The lesson for the historian is that, if the Coldham story could undergo such radical change in less than two centuries, there is little hope of recovering the truth about others for which there is no supporting textual or pictorial evidence. In the village of Stanningfield, beyond the gates of Coldham Hall, the family of the Catholic actress, playwright and novelist Elizabeth Inchbald née Simpson (1753–1821) were as much interested in ghosts and the supernatural as the lords of the manor. When she revisited her family home in 1781, Inchbald recorded in her diary that she and her mother ‘talked of Ghosts and of Mr Hunts death in the afternoon’.114 Hunt was Inchbald’s brother-in-law. Inchbald did not record what views she expressed in the discussion of ghosts, but her interest in the supernatural was sufficiently strong for her to make use of the ‘key and Bible’ four times over the next few weeks, using the key of Stanningfield church.115 In London, Inchbald visited a fashionable fortune-teller at the Old Bailey, but in Suffolk she was obliged 112

  Farrer, E., Portraits in Suffolk Houses (West) (London: B. Quaritch, 1908),

p. 325. 113

  Murdie, A., Haunted Bury St. Edmunds (Stroud: History Press, 2006), p. 69.   Inchbald, E. (ed. B.P. Robertson), The Diaries of Elizabeth Inchbald

114

(London: Pickering and Chatto, 2007), p. 256 (16 June 1781). 115   Ibid., pp. 263, 268, 270.

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to make do with a more primitive method.116 The ‘key and Bible’ was a form of divination usually used for discovering the name of a future husband or the identity of a thief, and occasionally for unbewitching. A key was placed on a particular verse and the Bible tightly bound, then someone held the Bible up by the key and the movements of the Bible were interpreted. Like many ‘Bible superstitions’ this was a particularly ‘Protestant’ form of divination but the Catholic Simpsons were evidently at home with it, even using the key of a parish church they never attended for the purpose. English Catholics and the Romantic Ghost Story In 1770, the priest and educationalist James Usher argued that ‘distinct or ideal fear, such as is occasioned by tales of ghosts or goblins’ was less significant than a sense of the sublime engendered by darkness: ‘It is not, as Mr. Locke says, that the tales of nurses have made night the scene of terrors, but that the solemnity and real awfulness of the night, has made it the natural scene of frightful tales and apparitions in all nations.’117 However, ‘the real awfulness of the night’ was for Usher the source of artistic inspiration rather than abject terror. The scenery of ghost stories had, in other words, overtaken the ghosts themselves in importance. Usher wrote in the spirit of the Romantic movement, for which superstition was ‘a necessary cultural ornament’.118 Ghost stories, whilst they may not have been taken any more seriously, were certainly avidly discussed and acceptable in the highest society. The titillating horrors of European Catholicism became central to the ‘Radcliffian Gothic’ of the 1780s and ’90s, and the Catholic villain in his castle was already a stereotype when Elizabeth Inchbald undermined it so effectively in the second volume of her novel A Simple Story (1791). Here, the former Catholic priest Lord Elmwood, far from keeping his daughter Matilda a prisoner in Elmwood Castle, forbids her ever to cross his path.119 Inchbald’s tyrannical Lord Elmwood was a nod towards the Gothic stereotype of the villainous baron. Another English Catholic, John William Polidori (1795–1812), had the distinction of creating a new Gothic stereotype altogether: the aristocratic vampire. Polidori was the son of an Italian father and an English Protestant mother, but he received an English

116

    118   119   117

Boaden, J., Memoirs of Mrs. Inchbald (London, 1833), vol. 1, p. 268. Usher (1770), pp. 117–18. Cameron (2010), p. 312. Inchbald, E., A Simple Story (London, 1791), vol. 3, p. 129.

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Catholic education at the nascent Ampleforth College in 1805–10.120 Polidori became Byron’s personal physician and, accompanying him to the Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva in the summer of 1816, he became a participant in the most famous ghost-story contest in history.121 This gave birth to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Polidori’s own story The Vampyre. However, The Vampyre was as much a bitter attack on Byron himself as a supernatural tale. In D.L. MacDonald’s view, Polidori’s rejoinder to Gothic anti-Catholicism took the form of the kindly priest in his novel Ernestus Berchtold (1819),122 but Polidori’s writings failed to meet with approval from his friend Thomas Burgess, the Prior of Ampleforth.123 In 1817, having broken with Byron, Polidori arrived in Norwich in the hope of taking over a medical practice. Harriet Martineau described him as ‘a foreigner’ and noted that ‘his being a Catholic, or passing for such, ensured him a welcome in some of the most aristocratic of the county houses.’124 Although Polidori was not one of them, Norwich was hardly a stranger to Catholic foreigners. Since 1792, a steady stream of French aristocratic and clerical émigrés had been pouring into London and the provincial towns, revitalizing the local Catholic community. One of the ‘county houses’ where Polidori was welcomed was Costessy Hall, the home of the Jerningham family; on returning from one visit to Costessy, Polidori crashed a gig into a tree and had to convalesce at home with the Jerninghams.125 The family shared Polidori’s active interest in the supernatural, as evidenced for instance in the Chevalier Charles Jerningham’s letters to his sisters, and it is hard to imagine that ghosts were not discussed during Polidori’s visits. The Chevalier, a naturalized French subject, general in the French Army and Knight of Malta, mediated between the émigré community and native Catholics. He showed a cautious

120   MacDonald, D.L., Poor Polidori: A Critical Biography of the Author of The Vampyre (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), pp. 6–14. 121   Polidori’s own diary provides the only contemporaneous account of the contest, recording that on 17 June 1816 the ghost stories were begun ‘by all but me’; Polidori did not begin his own story until 19 June (Polidori, J.W. (ed. W.M. Rossetti), The Diary of Dr. John William Polidori, 1816 (London: Elkin Mathews, 1911), pp. 125, 132). On the ghost story contest, see also Bishop, F.C., Polidori! A Life of Dr. John Polidori (Chislehurst: Gothic Society, 1991), pp. 40–47; MacDonald (1991), pp. 83–98. 122   MacDonald (1991), p. 169. For Polidori’s description of the dutiful priest Berchtold, see Polidori, J.W., Ernestus Berchtold; or, The Modern Oedipus (London, 1819), p. 5. 123   MacDonald (1991), pp. 175–6. 124   Ibid., p. 47. 125   Ibid., pp. 152–3. See also Jerningham, vol. 2, p. 111.

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interest in the supernatural, believing he could sense the fear of his lost dog,126 but at the same time he was anxious not to appear credulous. Handley recognized the influence of the French Revolution on English ghost narratives, which took the form of a pro-Trinitarian backlash against dissenters and Unitarians.127 However, the influence of the French exiles themselves has not been acknowledged. This influence was most readily felt by English Catholics with strong French connections, like the Jerninghams. On 30 March 1800, the Chevalier wrote to Lady Bedingfield concerning the death in a duel of a son of Francis Plowden (1749–1819), who was aide-de-camp to General Churchill in Jamaica. The Plowdens were, like the Jerninghams, an old Catholic family. The Chevalier added a story he had heard concerning the premonitory dreams of Plowden’s mother:128 The presentiments of Mrs Plowden … if they were not attested by her husband and many of her friends, I would have difficulty believing. She saw again and again that a miniature she had of her son faded progressively. One night she believed that it was completely without colour, and that another portrait had been substituted for this one, and having woken she at once got up in order to check if it was in the secretary. These dreams discomfited her and she did not stop saying that she would never see her son again. Her husband, in order to distract her from this idea, engaged her son to write to her as soon as possible. The last letter that he wrote contained, among other things, the fact that he enjoyed the best of health, that the climate was very good for him, that he was very content with General Churchill who treated him with every sort of kindness and friendship; in one word, this letter this made to calm all of his friends on his account. But his mother, on reading it, burst into tears and was unable to carry on reading for a long time, and continued to say that she was certain she would never see her son again. A few days after that she was engaged to dine in town. On seeing her enter, the people at whose house she was dining found her so changed and troubled that they asked her if she was ill. She told them that she had had a dream that she hid from her husband, but which, like Athalia, fostered a grief that gnawed at her heart. She had seen her son fall to the ground dead with a pistol in his right hand. He was wearing a costume that was not his uniform, just the same as what this young man was wearing on the day of his death – which, by the dates, seemed to be the very same when his mother had had this alarming dream.

The Chevalier’s purpose in sharing this story is not entirely clear, and it is possible that he simply liked to gossip. However, he had some standards. On 23 January 1801, he wrote to his sister Lady Jerningham with two ghost 126   Chevalier Charles Jerningham to Lady Bedingfield, 30 March 1800 (Jerningham, vol. 1, p. 166). 127   Handley (2007), pp. 166–70. 128   Jerningham, vol. 1, pp. 164–5.

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stories, only one of which he was prepared to tell in detail. He declined to tell ‘the story of the revenant of Witton, of which I have never spoken by reason of its absurdity’. However, on a visit to Lord Wodehouse’s house a ‘Mr. Fouqaire’ (probably a French priest129), took a great interest in the revenant and read out the testimonies of servants.130 If Fouqaire was a priest, this would suggest that the beliefs and preoccupations of the French clergy were indeed affecting English Catholics. Unfortunately, the Chevalier Jerningham gives us no details of the Witton apparition, but he showed more interest in another story: The Warwickshire revenant is interesting in quite another way. A French priest, in the neighbourhood of Sir Walter Blount, saw a coffin carried by two women set down in his bedroom in the middle of the night. This vision appeared three times. On the coffin was a number and the name of a London street. After many more supernatural invitations, this priest set out for London to the number indicated, and found in a bedroom a weeping woman seated on a coffin with another woman who was her sister-in-law; the corpse was the husband. The priest’s mission turned out to be to dissuade the widow from the designs of the sister-in-law, which were of such a kind as to be disastrous to her. He succeeded in setting a quarrel between the two women, and the brother of the accused attacked him, in justice (en justice), for having defamed [his sister].

The Warwickshire story was much discussed at Bath and this fact, combined with the implied financial element in the story and the Chevalier’s use of the term en justice to describe the brother, suggests that Bath society may have viewed the priest in the story unsympathetically, as a meddling foreigner excusing his actions by an appeal to the miraculous. In the absence of any other accounts we cannot be sure, but in this case it would seem that the scandal of the priest’s intervention, as much as the fabulous element of the story, excited the gentry in Bath. On 23 May 1817, Frances Jerningham (née Sulyard) wrote to her daughter Lady Bedingfield with a much more conventional ghost story, harking back to the admonishing spectres of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Frances Jerningham reported that Lady Frances Browne had just died at Brighton, and took the opportunity to report an anecdote concerning Lady Browne’s early education at New Hall in Essex, which became the home of the Canonesses of the Holy Sepulchre from Liege after the French Revolution:

129

  Bellenger, D.A., The French Exiled Clergy in the British Isles after 1789 (Bath: Downside Abbey, 1986), p. 185 records three priests named Fouquet but no Fouqaire. 130   Jerningham, vol. 1, pp. 200–201.

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When quite Young at New Hall, She waked one night Screaming out with sudden fear; the Nun who slept in the Room got up and went to Her, and also the Girls who had been waked. She Said: ‘Mama is here!’ looking wild with affright and Surprise. The Mistress tried to quiet her and at Last succeeded; but next morning she persisted in saying She had seen her mother, who had told Her she wished to warn Her against the dissipation she was naturally disposed to adopt and which would be very pernicious to Her.

Some years later, when Lady Browne was staying with Mrs Rookwood Gage in London, on her way to Hengrave Hall, she saw her mother’s ghost for a second time, ‘who had repeated her former injunctions more forcibly’. Lady Browne decided to become a nun as a result of the warnings, but died before she could accomplish her desire.131 On the death of Sir Richard Bedingfield in November 1829, Lady Bedingfield retired to the Benedictine convent at Hammersmith as a pensioner. There, in March 1830, she recorded in her diary that she was troubled by a spectre that manifested itself through unexplained knocking:132 Every time I began to fall asleep I was roused by a knock, seemingly upon the chest of Drawers close to my Bed. I felt surprised but not alarmed, the Idea of Ghosts has long ceased to terrify me! Many times have I lain, looking about my room, at the dead of night, and wishing to see the dear well remembered forms of those who have disappeared for ever! I had a light in my room and could conceive no cause for these little knocks – they were exactly as if somebody had knocked with their knuckle at my door, or rather on the drawers by the Bedside. Whatever it was, I answered it with a prayer! It occurred 4 times; every thing in the house was perfectly still, above and below, but the house dog bark[e]d.

For Lady Bedingfield, ghosts were nothing to be frightened of, not only because she felt herself to be so much fortified with piety but also because the idea of the return of the dead comforted rather than troubled her. Whilst certain themes in these later English Catholic ghost stories may indicate Continental influence, such as the idea of supernatural foreknowledge, they retained the same elements found in earlier narratives. Didactic spectres offering warnings or advice and mysterious knockings appeared just as they did in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The principal difference between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ghost narratives and their sixteenth- and seventeenth-century predecessors was not so much in the narratives themselves but in the fact that, from the eighteenth century onwards, ghost narratives could circulate as ‘intriguing 131

  Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 104–5.   Ibid., vol. 2, p. 317.

132

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curiosities’ instead of (or as well as) fearful testimonies of divine providence. To this extent, the ghost narratives of the eighteenth-century Catholic community were ‘domesticated’ and capable of transmission beyond the Catholic community itself. As Handley has observed, How’s story of the Edinburgh apparition was circulated without aspersions being cast on the witness (a Catholic lady) as inherently superstitious: ‘Protestants and Catholics were equally susceptible to optical illusion.’133 The Jerninghams’ and Bedingfields’ status in fashionable society did not diminish their belief in the supernatural, yet this was a belief that was worn lightly and was born of curiosity rather than morbid obsession. The eccentric Catholic author Thomas Ignatius Forster (1789–1860), who embraced most radical Enlightenment ideas, included a commentary on ghosts and apparitions in his almanack The Perennial Calendar in 1824.134 Forster situated himself within the sceptical Catholic tradition by invoking Alexander Pope’s ‘just ridicule’ of ghost beliefs.135 Although he located himself within a sceptical Enlightenment tradition, Forster differed from the classic rationalist account by insisting that people really did see ghosts, as well as his pseudo-scientific attempt to explain ghost-seeing. His appeal to ‘erroneous action of the brain’ unwittingly resembled Thomas White’s ‘psychological’ account of apparitions in the seventeenth century. Forster was tapping into a Catholic tradition older than even he was aware, which had the benefit of allowing ancient historians to be taken at face value rather than treated as liars. However, the most consciously ‘Catholic’ element of Forster’s argument was his contention that superstition was a product of the Reformation:136 After that period of corruption in morals and licentiousness in religion which overthrew the cheering and hopeful faith of the Catholic church in this country, a puritanical age of superstition succeeded, whose horrors were consummated in the unhappy days of Charles the First, because the degenerate minds of men were then fittest to entertain the dismal phantasms of a sensorium disordered by a peculiar combination of sensuality and despondency.

Whilst admitting that apparitions were common in the Middle Ages, Forster insisted that they were predominantly positive on account of the 133

  Handley (2007), p. 172.   Forster, T., The Perennial Calendar (London, 1824), pp. 752–5. 135   Probably a reference to the comic poem Sandys’s Ghost (1717) in which 134

the spectre of Sandys boasts not only the stereotypical ‘saucer Eyes of Fire’ but also ‘whiskers, band, and, pantaloon, / And ruff compos’d most duly’ (Pope, Poems, p. 301). 136   Forster (1824), pp. 753–4.

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‘consistent bond of Union’ that existed in mediaeval thought and the positive effects of Catholic ritual. Without the reassuring endorsement of the church, apparitions took on a much darker character. Forster existed on the fringes of the Catholic church in England and was more readily identifiable with radicalism than with the theological positions held within the church. However, Joseph Berington copied some of Forster’s remarks on ghosts in The Perennial Calendar for his own reference,137 demonstrating that there was some crossover between the mainstream scepticism of the Cisalpines and the more outlandish speculations of the likes of Forster. Berington’s manuscript was not, as Handley has claimed, a ‘highly incendiary tract’ but merely a transcription of Forster.138 However, Forster’s writings and Berington’s response to them do suggest the existence of a body of quiet sceptics concerning ghostly apparitions among Catholics of more radical views at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

137

  Birmingham Archdiocesan Archives C2365.   Handley (2007), p. 172.

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CHAPTER 4

Catholics, Witchcraft and Magic in Reformation England Belief in witchcraft was something that virtually all early modern English men and women shared, irrespective of religious allegiance. Yet the Catholic response to and perception of witchcraft was distinctive, informed by the influence of Continental demonology and conditioned by the pastoral concerns of the Catholic mission. Catholic voices, hitherto unnoticed and unheard, deserve a place in the study of English witchcraft. This chapter considers both the internal perspective of the Catholic community on witchcraft and magic, and external perceptions of the relationship between witchcraft and Catholicism by non-Catholics. These external perceptions had a profound effect on Catholics themselves; the ultimate failure of Protestant attempts to associate Catholicism with witchcraft freed Catholics from the danger of prosecution for witchcraft, yet also resulted in the triumph of an alternative anti-Catholic rhetoric that portrayed Catholics as inveterate fakers of supernatural occurrences. As an essentially secretive section of early modern English society, the Catholic community was never fertile ground for accusations of witchcraft and claims of possession. French magistrates realized in the late seventeenth century that witchcraft accusations and demoniacs flourished where they could receive the greatest amount of publicity, and they were best dealt with by stifling that publicity.1 Unlike some Protestants who felt that they could empower themselves by self-identifying as victims of the devil, English Catholics had nothing to gain by drawing attention to themselves in this way. Keith Thomas defined the early modern witch as ‘a person of either sex (but more often female) who could mysteriously injure other people’.2 The term maleficium was applied both to the injury thus caused as well as the crime of witchcraft itself. Although early modern theologians of all persuasions were apt to lump together witchcraft, cunning-craft, charming and ritual magic as idolatry, this theological hostility did not translate into 1

  McManners, J., Church and Society in Eighteenth-Century France, Volume 2: The Religion of the People and the Politics of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 221–2. 2   Thomas (1991), p. 519.

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an equal treatment of all forms of magic by the law, or indeed society. Cunning-craft and charming, in particular, were frequently tolerated. Witchcraft stood out as both uniquely threatening to the community and directly satanic when interpreted, as it often was, as the outcome of a pact between a witch and the devil. Even ritual magic or conjuration, which was thought to invoke demons, was not usually regarded as a formal pact with them.3 Indeed, the conceptualization of witchcraft as a pact separated it from conjuration. Unlike conjuration, it required no skill or learning as its effects were accomplished directly by the devil. The Conjuration Act of 1542, the first of its kind, prohibited ‘any invocations or conjuration of spirits, witchcrafts, inchantments or sorceries’, specifically mentioning the use of magic to find lost or stolen goods, the destruction or wasting of a person’s body, limbs or goods by magical means, love magic, and treasure-seeking.4 Technically, this Act, which was repealed in 1547, made both conjuration and witchcraft capital offences, although it is notable that it made no reference to a satanic pact. The Witchcraft Act of 1563 also included enchantment, charming and sorcery within its scope but it limited the death penalty to those convicted of causing the death of a human being by the invocation of evil spirits. In practice, it was only witches who fell into this category. In the 1604 Witchcraft Act, enchantment, charming and sorcery were relegated to the background (whilst remaining illegal), and witchcraft through compact with the devil took centre stage.5 This chapter cannot include an exhaustive discussion of the numerous interpretations of the sudden appearance of witchcraft as a significant crime in Elizabeth’s reign. For Thomas, the explanation was essentially anthropological: the Witchcraft Act of 1563 was a direct consequence of the Reformation’s unintended ‘privatization’ of spiritual services once offered by the clergy and the saints within the framework of the preReformation church. The church had kept a check on the more wayward manifestations of popular superstition, but the refusal of the new Protestant establishment to endorse any spiritual remedies other than prayer, fasting and faithfulness to God led people to turn to cunning-folk, and the new church’s demonization of formal cursing magnified the seriousness of witchcraft.6 For Peter Elmer and Norman Jones, on the other hand, the rise of the witchcraft obsession was a political phenomenon, occurring at a

3   On the distinction between ‘implicit’ and ‘explicit’ demonic pacts made by some Counter-Reformation theologians, see Cameron (2010), p. 192. 4   Thomas (1991), p. 525. 5   Ibid., pp. 526–7. 6   Ibid., p. 611.

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time when the government of Queen Elizabeth needed to legitimate itself.7 In Jones’s view, the Witchcraft Act was a response to a magical threat specifically from Catholics.8 Thomas’s anthropological analysis of English witchcraft as a creation of the ‘spiritual vacuum’ of the Reformation provided no explanation of why English Catholics, who presumably continued to believe in the effectiveness of the church’s remedies, believed much the same things as their non-Catholic neighbours about witches. If Catholics were primarily influenced by their immersion in a culture where belief in witchcraft was accepted, then the Counter-Reformation church was a relatively weak influence on Catholics’ attitudes to the invisible world. If, on the other hand, English Catholic belief in witchcraft followed a completely different pattern from that of non-Catholics, then Catholics were representatives of a foreign, parallel culture of supernatural belief brought to England by missionary priests. In reality, Catholic witchcraft belief was a composite of English and Continental influences. Catholic and Protestant on Witchcraft Protestant and Catholic works on witchcraft across Reformation Europe displayed few significant differences,9 and where these did occur they were differences of imagery rather than attitude. Protestant authors were happy to draw on Catholic demonology, such as the high churchman Sir Robert Filmer’s reliance on the Spanish Jesuit Martin Del Rio in a pamphlet of 1653.10 Euan Cameron has argued that, in general, Catholics were credulous in accepting all aspects of the ‘witch myth’, while Protestants were more cautious.11 Catholics had a tendency to see witches as members of a cult of devil-worshippers, and stories of the witches’ Sabbath, sexual immorality, shape-shifting and cannibalism were more common 7

  Elmer, P., ‘Towards a politics of witchcraft in early modern England’ in Clark, S. (ed.), Languages of Witchcraft: Narrative, Ideology and Meaning in Early Modern Culture (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 2001), pp. 101–18, at p. 106. 8   Jones, N., ‘Defining Superstitions: Treasonous Catholics and the Act against Witchcraft of 1563’ in Carlton, C. et al. (eds), State, Sovereigns and Society in Early Modern England: Essays in Honour of A. J. Slavin (Stroud: Sutton, 1998), pp. 187–204. 9   Clark (1997), p. 527. See also Clark, S., ‘Protestant Witchcraft, Catholic Witchcraft’ in Oldridge, D. (ed.), The Witchcraft Reader (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 165–77. 10   Filmer, R., An Advertisement to the Jury-men of England, touching Witches (London, 1653), pp. 3–4. 11   Clark (1997), p. 528; Cameron (2010), pp. 193–5.

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in Catholic countries. Catholics ‘demonized’ witches and set them apart from normal life to a greater extent than English Protestants, for whom the witch was primarily an isolated, insidious figure within the community. Catholics and Protestants were agreed that witchcraft consisted of a pact made between the witch and the devil, whereby the devil could do harm on the witch’s behalf. Where Catholic and Protestant treatises on the subject really differed was on the measures that could be taken against witches and witchcraft, with Protestants stressing the power of the civil magistrate and Catholics acknowledging the virtue of relics, exorcism, the intercession of saints and priestly power. Julio Caro Baroja saw the emphasis on satanic rituals in sixteenth-century Catholic witchcraft literature as a mark of the progressive ‘diabolization’ of witchcraft. Witchcraft had been considered as nothing more than illusion for much of the Middle Ages, owing to the influence of the Canon Episcopi, but from the fifteenth century, the idea that witches were involved in a demonic conspiracy took hold of the European imagination.12 However, acceptance of the total reality of witchcraft remained controversial in Catholic Europe; the Spanish Inquisition operated on the basis that witchcraft was largely delusion,13 and there was considerable diversity of opinions among theologians that Baroja saw as a rivalry between the Jesuits and Dominicans. Whilst the Dominicans were determined to uphold a demonological ‘realism’ concerning physical manifestations of the devil derived from the Malleus Maleficarum, Jesuits (with the notable exception of Martin Del Rio) tended to take a more sceptical approach.14 In Protestant England, the ‘witch myth’ was stripped down to its bare essentials. Nevertheless, English witchcraft belief remained grounded in popular belief as much as Protestant theology. Darren Oldridge has argued that the endorsement of folk beliefs about witches and witchcraft by godly Protestant authors in the seventeenth century produced a deadly synthesis of fundamentalist Biblicism and traditional beliefs.15 The Bible says nothing of satanic pacts, the witches’ mark, suckling familiars, or the physical invasion of the body by a spirit in material shape, yet these were all phenomena accepted as real by the ‘godly’ in Suffolk and Essex during Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne’s infamous witch-hunt there during the 1640s. As Oldridge observes, had Protestants been truer to the

12 13

  Baroja (1990), p. 34.   Henningsen, G., ‘“The Ladies from Outside”: An Archaic Pattern of the

Witches’ Sabbath’, in Ankarloo and Henningsen (1990), pp. 191–215, at p. 194. 14   Baroja (1990), pp. 40–42. 15   Oldridge (2010), pp. 178–80.

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Bible then they might have adopted a more sceptical approach, as certain German Reformers did.16 A direct comparison between the beliefs of English Catholics concerning witchcraft and those of English Protestants is problematic, since the social and cultural contexts of Catholic and Protestant discourse on the subject were usually very different. Whereas godly Protestantism was a dominant (if not universally accepted) cultural and political force in mid-seventeenthcentury East Anglia and in England as a whole, in most cases Catholic commentary was confined to a small, insular community. Put more simply, what Catholics said or thought about witchcraft did not matter in wider society. Furthermore, witchcraft belief transcended denominational boundaries and it cannot be assumed that most people in England held the beliefs about witchcraft they did because they were Protestants, any more than Catholics held the beliefs they did because they were Catholics. To take one example, the bewitchment of the Catholic Francis Manners, Earl of Rutland and his family at Belvoir Castle in 1618 did not differ in any significant way from other bewitchments of elite figures by their social inferiors, such as the godly Cromwells at Warboys in Huntingdonshire.17 The Earl’s belief in witchcraft and his willingness to make use of the machinery of the law against Margaret and Joan Flower, the suspected witches, do not seem to have been affected by his confessional allegiance. However, on closer inspection, the Earl’s hesitation in bringing the case to the attention of the authorities and the fact that he ‘urged nothing against [the witches] but their own Confessions’ reveals the difficult position Catholics were in when it came to witchcraft.18 It is likely that the Earl’s initial reticence stemmed from a desire to ensure that the case did not turn into an opportunity for antiCatholic propaganda. The idea that Catholics faked hauntings, possessions and exorcisms was established by the time of the Belvoir Castle case. The relationship between English Catholics and witchcraft was undoubtedly conditioned by the nature of anti-Catholic polemic as well as the Continental ideas about witchcraft that Catholics were more likely than anyone else to imbibe. Jesuits in Lancashire, no less than puritan preachers in Suffolk, endorsed popular beliefs and practices and instrumentalized witchcraft belief as a missionary tool. However, unlike Protestants, the Catholic clergy could draw on a large body of Continental demonological writing. Whereas Protestant exorcists and unbewitchers drew both their authority and their practice from the Bible and then responded either positively or negatively to popular beliefs about the nature of bewitchment, 16

  Ibid., p. 138.   Boulton, R., A Compleat History of Magick, Sorcery and Witchcraft

17

(London, 1715), vol. 1, pp. 177–95. 18   Ibid., p. 195.

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Catholic exorcists also had the testimony of a continuous tradition of exorcism that they regarded as authoritative. This created the potential for elements of foreign folklore to seep into the witch-beliefs of English Catholics and others via the work of missionary clergy. As puritanism took hold in the mid-seventeenth century, the satanic pact and the ‘crime against God’ became more important to godly commentators than the maleficium against people and goods.19 In this respect, puritan literature began to resemble Catholic literature more closely, and William Prynne’s argument that dancing was an implicit satanic pact in his Histrio-mastix (1633) was derived from the idea of the witches’ Sabbath.20 Catholic commentators had long drawn an analogy between witchcraft and heresy and saw defection from the worship of God as a spiritual crime. The fact that Protestants and Catholics alike deployed witchcraft as an analogy for what they perceived as spiritual sicknesses (popery for Protestants and heresy for Catholics) confirms Stuart Clark’s thesis that witchcraft was essentially an emblem of social, cultural and spiritual ‘inversion’.21 However, Catholics were the first to interpret witchcraft as inversion and Protestants came later to the theme. The marginalization of the spiritual testimony of women in the Reformation period by both Protestants and Catholics has been seen as a key factor in the proliferation of post-Reformation bewitchments.22 Possession and illness gave women permission to challenge figures of authority and engage in activities such as preaching, exhortation and prophecy that were closed to them. Whilst the Counter-Reformation in Italy, Spain and elsewhere clamped down on visionary women, who were frequently suspected of demonic involvement and persuaded as such by their confessors, this was a phenomenon largely unknown among English Catholics, where there was considerable tolerance of visionary experiences.23 In the early seventeenth century, visions were an accepted occurrence in the convents of Benedictine nuns at Brussels and Ghent, and on occasion they challenged ecclesiastical authority. A vision of ‘our B[lesse]d lady, having all the Religious of the monastery under her mantle’ warned a zealous inquisitor in 1614 that she had taken the Brussels monastery

19

  Oldridge (2010), p. 164.   Prynne, W., Histrio-mastix (London, 1633), pp. 228–31; Johnstone (2006),

20

p. 206. 21

  For this argument, see Clark, S., ‘Inversion, Misrule and the Meaning of Witchcraft’, Past and Present 87 (1980), pp. 98–127. 22   Sluhovsky (2007), pp. 207–64; Hallett (2007b), pp. 32–3; Oldridge (2010), pp. 130–33. 23   Walsham (2003), pp. 805–6.

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under her special protection.24 As aliens in a foreign land, English religious communities were often vulnerable to attempts by the local ecclesiastical and secular authorities to infringe their privileges, and an appeal to divine intervention served a useful purpose in such cases. On the other hand, there are signs of caution in convent annals as well. In 1624, Sister Cicely Price was ‘favoured by Allmighty God, w[i]th many spirituall graces, visitations; and some visions of o[u]r B[lesse]d Lady’,25 but the annals took care to explain that, although Christine Forster (d. 1650) experienced ‘transports’, ‘nether any thing appeard in her th[a]t was extravagant or vyolent’.26 Accusations of witchcraft made by one group of nuns against another surfaced when Lady Mary Percy’s government of the English Benedictine convent in Brussels caused a rift in the community in the late 1620s. In a lengthy reply to the allegations made against her written in 1631, the Abbess refuted ‘hints of impropriety between some nuns and their confessor, and the possibility that certain novices had dabbled in witchcraft’. Allegations of witchcraft were just one among many charges laid against the Abbess, however, and the root cause of the dispute was political and spiritual. In 1628, the Archbishop of Mechelen, Jacob Boonen, appointed an antiJesuit confessor, Anthony Champney, who was opposed by Mary Percy and her supporters.27 It is no surprise that anti-Jesuit nuns, suspicious of the excesses of Jesuit spirituality, took their critique a step further by accusing novices under Jesuit influence of dabbling in witchcraft. From the middle of the seventeenth century onwards, there were no further mentions of supernatural visions in the annals of the Benedictine nuns. Claire Walker has drawn attention to the growing influence of the works of Alfonso Rodriquez on European Jesuit confessors, which downplayed the visionary potential of Ignatian spirituality.28 This, or the danger of division over spiritual matters witnessed at Brussels, contributed to a Benedictine silence concerning visions. Elsewhere, however, visions continued, especially among the English Carmelites. Catherine Burton, a young woman from Beyton in Suffolk who later joined the Carmelites at Antwerp, had visions in her sickbed in the late 1680s and early 1690s, and her miraculous cures were actively promoted by local Jesuits.29 However, Carmelites were also conscious of the thin line between female spirituality 24

  Neville, A., ‘English Benedictine Nuns in Flanders, 1598–1687: Annals of their Five Communities’, in Miscellanea V (London: CRS, 1909), pp. 1–72, at p. 4. 25   Neville (1909), p. 12. 26   Ibid., p. 34. 27   Walker, C., Gender and Politics in Early Modern Europe: English Convents in France and the Low Countries (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003), p. 70. 28   Walker (2003), p. 141. 29   Hunter (1876), pp. 32–66.

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and witchcraft. In 1651, the Lierre Carmelite Margaret Mostyn confessed to Edmund Bedingfield that she had been reluctant to discuss special revelations concerning the special power of a set of rosary beads in combating the devil, since ‘if she said anything of it, & it proved to be true, then she would be burned as a witch like Luisia, a religious woman of Spain.’30 Nicky Hallett has argued that Margaret’s remark demonstrated her awareness that her possession might endanger herself and the rest of her community,31 but if this was the case then it seems odd that Margaret referred to her fear of being accused of witchcraft only on this one occasion. Both Margaret and her confessor were a great deal less conscious than they might have been of the dangers of being accused of witchcraft; Edmund Bedingfield never gave voice to this concern, and his main anxiety was his worthiness to the perform the exorcism effectively.32 Indeed, Bedingfield scarcely conformed to Walker’s portrayal of the Counter-Reformation convent confessor as a ‘supernatural moderator’, curbing the nuns’ spiritual excesses.33 Margaret seems to have been concerned that a special revelation concerning a particular object rather than her possession might lead to the accusation of witchcraft. However, there is no evidence to suggest that Margaret’s fears were justified and she was never accused of witchcraft. One possible reason for the relative tolerance of women’s spirituality in the English Catholic community is that, as an already marginalized community, Catholics did not feel threatened by the utterances of women. Furthermore, the existence of convents on the Continent as destinations for young women in the Catholic community who demonstrated unusual spiritual gifts allowed the potential threat they presented to the community’s stability to be absorbed. This was not true of Protestant visionaries, whose sole aspiration should have been marriage. In the case of Catharine Burton, her confessor and others arranged for her to enter the Antwerp convent, which provided a conclusion to her public story.34 Catholics were free to interpret women’s unusual spiritual gifts as a sign that they were destined for the religious life, where the exercise of these gifts would be hidden from the world and perhaps suppressed by superiors and confessors. However, since convents stood outside normal society, the visions and miracles of 30

  Hallett (2007b), p. 82. For studies of the role of witchcraft in seventeenthcentury convents, see Harline, C., The Burdens of Sister Margaret (New York: Doubleday, 1994); Watt, J.R., The Scourge of Demons: Possession, Lust and Witchcraft in a Seventeenth-Century Italian Convent (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2009). 31   Hallett (2007b), p. 22. 32   Ibid., p. 71. 33   Walker (2003), p. 132. 34   Hunter (1876), pp. 11, 98.

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their inmates did not challenge established order. On the contrary, they served as a supernatural endorsement of the monastic life and thereby the Catholic faith itself. With one or two exceptions, witchcraft was never a significant preoccupation among English Catholics and no treatise devoted to the subject was produced by a Catholic Englishman in the early modern period. However, witchcraft received the occasional mention in texts devoted to other subjects. In 1555, Edmund Bonner, the last Catholic Bishop of London, was convinced of the reality of satanic pacts and issued a strong warning against witchcraft in the course of his exposition of the Ten Commandments:35 Without dout suche witches Coniurers, enchaunters, and all such like, do worke by the operation and ayde of the devyll, and unto him for the attaynyng of theyr wicked enterprises, they do servyce, and honor, of which abhomination we are warned, & expresly commaunded to take hede, & flye from … For w[i]t[h] out al doute most grevously do they offende agaynst the honoure of God, who having in their baptisme professed to renounce the devyll & all his workes, do yet neverthelesse make secrete pactes and covenauntes with the devil, or do use anye maner of coniurations, to rayse up devylles for treasure, or any other thing hid or lost or for anye maner of cause, whatsoever it be: for al such committe so high offence and treason to God, that there can be no greater. For they yelde the honoure dewe unto God, to Goddes enemye and not onelye all suche as use charmes, withcraftes, and coniurations, trangresse thys cheife and hyghe commaundemente, but also those that seke and resorte unto them, for anye counsayle or remedy.

Bonner’s identification of witchcraft with idolatry, and a violation of the first and second commandments, located him within the mainstream of the Counter-Reformation, yet it also chimed with Protestant demonology. His Profitable and Necessary Doctrine was ‘the nearest thing that the Marian church produced to a comprehensible defence of the catholic faith’, and it enjoyed official status throughout England from 1556 alongside the statesanctioned book of homilies.36 Bonner’s works continued to be read within the recusant community long after his death,37 and there is no reason to think that Catholics who went into exile in the reign of Elizabeth held views of witchcraft substantially different from their Protestant contemporaries. Keith Thomas argued that Bonner’s views were indistinguishable from 35

  Bonner, E., A Profitable and Necessarye Doctrine with certayne Homelies adioyned thereunto (London, 1555), sig. Hhii. 36   Duffy (2009), pp. 64–5. 37   They appear, for example, in the library of Thomas Rookwood at Coldham Hall in the 1720s (CUL Hengrave MS 77/1).

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those of his Protestant rivals and equally vehement.38 The repeal of the Conjuration Act in 1547 meant that there was no law against witchcraft on the statute books during Mary’s reign, but this did not mean that witchcraft was not a matter of interest to church courts. Individuals were arraigned for witchcraft in the church courts in the diocese of Chichester,39 and in a visitation of his diocese in 1554, Bonner enquired ‘whether there be any that use charms, witchcraft, sorcery, enchantments, false soothsayings, or any such-like thing’.40 Alan MacFarlane concluded, on the basis of Agnes Waterhouse’s claims to have ‘learnt’ witchcraft in the reign of Queen Mary, that popular belief in witchcraft was prevalent well before 1558.41 Elizabethan Catholic exiles showed no disinclination to accept the full reality of tales of witchcraft. In his History of Ireland, composed in around 1569, the Oxford scholar Edmund Campion recorded lurid details of the witchcraft of Lady Alice Kettle of Kilkenny in the reign of Edward II and offered no sceptical commentary,42 in spite of his sharp criticism of the miracles associated with St Patrick’s Purgatory.43 In 1609, the annotations of the Douai-Rheims Bible put forward the conventional view of witchcraft as a satanic pact, and, following Bonner, classed witchcraft as a form of idolatry: ‘Al Idolaters are most wicked … Whether they immediatly honour divels, as when sorcerers and witches, making pact with the divel, adore him, and he for the same doth that which they demand.’44 The Catholic or crypto-Catholic pamphleteer Thomas Lodge expressed considerable interest in witchcraft in The Divel Conjur’d (1596), which featured a discussion of ‘The fascination and charming of children, by witches, or infants, by inchanters’. Lodge was torn between a ‘naturalistic’ interpretation of witchcraft as malevolent influence transmitted by sight (fascination) and the standard model of demonic compact witchcraft:45 … either the witches soule infected with mallice, corrupteth the aire by her sight, and by that means infecteth yong infants (especially such who have

38

  Thomas (1991), pp. 307, 595–6.   Lander, S., ‘Church Courts and the Reformation in the Diocese of

39

Chichester, 1500–58’, in Haigh, C. (ed.), The English Reformation Revised (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 34–55, at p. 51. 40   MacFarlane, A., Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 67. 41   Ibid., pp. 186–7. 42   Campion, T. and Hanmer, M., Two Histories of Ireland (Dublin, 1633), pp. 85–6. 43   Ibid., pp. 41–2. 44   Douai-Rheims Bible (Douai, 1609–10), vol. 2, p. 209. 45   Lodge (1596), pp. 30–31.

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tender bodies capable of impression:) or otherwise, such fascination ought to be attributed to the mallice of devils, with whom the foresaid witches are confederat, which commeth to passe either by hidden fate, or Gods permission.

Martin Del Rio discussed the possibility of ocular fascination, which for learned authors recalled a passage of Aristotle’s treatise On Dreams in which the philosopher claimed that mirrors could be stained by the eyes of menstruating women.46 Del Rio cleverly circumvented the question of whether maleficium was caused by a satanic pact or the evil eye by claiming that the evil eye itself was a kind of ‘devil’s mark’ conferred on those who made a pact with the devil.47 Thomas Lodge’s view that women were more likely to be witches than men was widely shared and conventional: ‘because carnall desire is the aime of Magicians, and women by nature are more flexible, it commonly falleth out, that there are more women witches than men.’48 His condemnation of witchcraft was as strident as that of his puritan contemporaries: ‘all works and conversing with witches is wicked, their counsailes reprobate, and their works damned.’49 However, although his conclusions may have been uncontroversial, Lodge’s use of the concepts and vocabulary of Scholastic philosophy was suggestive of his Catholic sympathies.50 In 1583, Laurence Vaux explained that people broke the first commandment by ‘Art Magik’ when they ‘of purpose tel destinies by taking of lottes, or verses in the scriptures, Encha[n]ters, witches, Sorcerers, interpreters of dreames … and all they that advisedly use their help to recover health, or to get a thing that is lost’.51 Some Catholic authors commented on witchcraft in the context of refutation of accusations of witchcraft and magic made against Catholicism by Protestants. John Martiall pointed out that Calvin and John Calfhill’s denunciations of Catholic miracles as witchcraft followed in the tradition of the Pharisees who claimed that Christ cast out devils by Beelzebub.52 Robert Chambers, the confessor of the English Benedictines at Brussels, translated Philippe Numan’s Miracles lately wrought by the Intercession of the Glorious Virgin Marie, at Mont-aigu, near unto Siché in Brabant 46

Aristotle, On Dreams 460a5–13. Del Rio (2000 [1595]), pp. 124–5. Lodge (1596), p. 34. Ibid., p. 39. Lodge made eight explicit references to arguments of ‘the schoolmen’ and even quoted St Thomas Aquinas by name (p. 34): see pp. 24, 25, 27, 31, 34, 39, 53, 55. 51   Vaux, L., A Catechisme or Christian Doctrine necesssarie for Children and ignorante People (Louvain, 1583), sig. C iiii, p. 5. 52   Martiall (1566), p. 180.     48   49   50   47

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(1606), in which the author refuted the charge that the miracles of the saints were wrought by witchcraft on the grounds that the more loudly heretics proclaimed this, the more genuine were Catholic miracles.53 Other Catholic authors turned the accusation of witchcraft against their Protestant adversaries by assimilating witchcraft to heresy. This approach first appeared in Gregory Martin’s annotations to the Rheims New Testament (1582), where Martin applied Biblical warnings against witchcraft to heresy as well:54 Curious and unlawful sciences, as Witchcraft, Necromancie, and other meanes of divination by soothsaying, figure-casting, interpretation of dreames, or any way not allowed by God and his Church, must much more be abhorred of old Christians, when these so lately converted were so zelous and diligent to leave them[.] And by this example al that are newly reconciled to the Church, are taught, the first thing they do, to burne their heretical and naughtie bookes.

In the 1580s, the newly reconciled to the Catholic church were less likely to be burning books of necromancy than books by Protestant theologians. Furthermore, Martin’s reference to ‘old Christians’, whilst ostensibly referring to cradle Catholics as opposed to converts, could be interpreted as a warning to the followers of the ‘old religion’ as a whole, who could not remain addicted to superstition if they were to provide an example to Protestants. Counter-Reformation Catholicism, if it were to remain strong, could not be burdened with a pre-Reformation laxity when it came to superstition and magic. The metaphor of witchcraft as heresy was made even plainer by Humphrey Leech in his Dutifull and Respectfull Considerations (1609) addressed directly to King James. Leech implicitly compared James to King Jehu, unable to escape the consequences of the witchcraft of his mother Jezebel (a thinly veiled reference to Elizabeth). ‘What peace can the Catholike make with the Hereticke’, Leech asked, ‘whilest his heresy worse then the sinne of witchcraft, and his spiritual fornications in worshiping false gods, that is, intertaining false opinions in religion and dissonant from the Catholike faith[?]’55 Leech twice used the metaphor of bewitchment to describe the effect of Protestant arguments on the King

53   Numan, P., (trans. R. Chambers), Miracles lately wrought by the Intercession of the Glorious Virgin Marie, at Mont-aigu, near unto Siché in Brabant (Antwerp, 1606), p. 27. 54   Martin, G. (trans.), The New Testament of Iesus Christ (Rheims, 1582), p. 350. 55   Leech (1609), p. 6.

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and his people.56 Given James’s well-known interest in witchcraft, Leech may well have thought that the metaphor might catch the King’s attention. Perhaps the most comprehensive (albeit problematic) attempt to draw the analogy between witchcraft and heresy by an English Catholic author was Thomas Stapleton’s Latin address to graduands of the University of Louvain in August 1594. Stapleton was then Professor of Sacred Scripture at the university. He was a product of Marian Oxford and a theologian of international stature who ‘earned a European reputation as a controversialist second only to that of Bellarmine’,57 yet his views on witchcraft, hidden deep in the 1620 edition of his collected works,58 did not receive any historical notice until Clark drew attention to them in 1997.59 In the address, entitled Cur magia pariter cum haeresi hodie creverit (‘Why magic should grow equally with heresy’), Stapleton argued that the growth of ‘magic’ and the growth of heresy were intimately connected; both were inspired by ‘carnal desire’, hatred of authority and impious curiosity, and both appealed to dissidents and the intellectually shiftless. This was a standard argument of Counter-Reformation theologians;60 in the 1560s, John Martiall had argued that James Calfhill envied Catholic miracles like Pharaoh, ‘who would not beleave the true miracles wrought of God … because he understoode that his sorcerers and wisserders of Egipte were able to doe the like by incantations and inchauntmentes’.61 Calfhill rejected miracles done to confirm the true faith whilst accepting that heretics, necromancers and devils worked wonders, thus confirming that his faith was really in the devil and not in God.62 Stapleton derived his views on magic and witchcraft primarily from Sprenger and Kramer’s Malleus Maleficarum (1487), which he cited several times in some detail, as well as several other more or less obscure demonological works: Peter Binsfeld’s De Confessionibus Maleficorum et Sagarum (1589), Peter Thryraeus’s De Spirituum Apparitione (1594), Leonard Vair’s De Fascinis (1589), a treatise De Spectris by ‘Petrus Foenus’, Jean Bodin’s De la démonomanie des sorcières (1581) and Bernard Basin’s

56

Ibid., pp. 55, 124. Duffy (2009), p. 201. Stapleton (1620), vol. 2, pp. 502–8. Clark (1997), pp. 535–7. On Stapleton, see also O’Connell, M.R., Thomas Stapleton and the Counter-Reformation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1964). 60   On Counter-Reformation ‘demonization’ of Protestants as witches and sorcerers, see Cameron (2010), pp. 237–9. 61   Martiall (1566), p. 181r. 62   Ibid., p. 190r.     58   59   57

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Tractatus de Artibus Magicis (1483).63 Both heresy and magic, Stapleton argued, involved the denial of the Catholic faith in apparently small matters, but ended with the rejection of the essentials. Stapleton also drew an analogy between the power of the devil in magic and his power over heretics. The power of magic does not derive from words, symbols, or any occult virtue of the magicians themselves but from the devil’s agency, and the same is true of the Reformers. People are convinced to apostatize not by the eloquence of preachers ‘but through that same Satan whose servants they are and who works through them’. He compared the Protestant heretics to the Zoroastrian magi; in the same way that people were lured into admiration of the magi for their skill in medicine and mathematics, and eventually came to praise them for their magic as well, so people are lured into praising the ‘polite literature and language’ of heretics and end up forsaking the Catholic faith.64 Just as magicians can be identified by their superfluous use of superstitious ceremonies, so heretics can be identified by their introduction of novel and superfluous doctrines. The same severe measures should be enacted against heretics, Stapleton argued, as had in times past been taken against magicians; they and their books should be burnt, and they should be shunned by all Christian people.65 Stapleton’s argument suggests that he believed, along with puritan magistrates in England, that witchcraft was on the rise. Ordinary Catholics shared the same conviction. In 1607, John Rudgley told his questioners at the English College in Rome that he considered every old woman he met on the road to be a potential venefica or incantatrix, since ‘many pests of this sort are prowling (grassarentur) in those parts.’ Rudgley feared strange women walking the open road, the space between communities, rather than outsiders within the community of his town or village. Stapleton repeatedly used the same verb chosen by the clerks at the English College, grassor, to describe the sinister intent of both heretics and magicians. Although Stapleton’s address would have reached only a small audience, large numbers of English seminary priests went to Louvain in order to study for higher degrees and Stapleton was a highly influential figure on them and on their Continental counterparts. However, the academic language in which Stapleton couched his speech had its limitations. Stapleton drew from Bodin the idea that witchcraft was a satanic pact (foedus cum daemone) and yet he consciously conflated witches, for whom he used such words as saga, stryx and malefix with magi (magicians or Zoroastrian priests) and even lamiae (the vampire-like creatures of ancient 63

  Stapleton (1620), vol. 2, p. 502. On Basin, see Baroja (1990), p. 33.   Stapleton (1620), vol. 2, p. 505. 65   Ibid., p. 507. 64

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mythology). Magia, for Stapleton, included maleficia as well as spells and incantations, divination, sorcery, necromancy, geomancy, hydromancy, aeromancy, cheiromancy, augury and ‘spatulantia’.66 By lumping together the elite magic of Zoroastrian priests, pact witchcraft and activities such as fortune-telling under the one title of magia, Stapleton failed to single out witchcraft as a specific threat. Rather, he ended up portraying the rise of magic as a symptom of spiritual decadence whose most harmful manifestation was not witchcraft but heresy. Jeffrey Burton Russell saw Bodin’s willingness to link magicians and witches as a characteristic feature of Aristotelian (and therefore usually Catholic) commentators.67 However, rather than being linked to a specific philosophical position, the conflation of magicians and witches may have owed more to the limited resources of the Latin language that was used in almost all Catholic educational institutions. The word venefica refers specifically to a female poisoner (a single type of maleficium), while an incantatrix is a woman who sings or chants spells. Both of these activities might be elements of witchcraft, but since the idea of pact witchcraft did not exist in the Classical world, it was natural enough that no word existed that was exactly equivalent in meaning to the English ‘witch’; malefix means literally ‘a female evildoer’. The vocabulary of seventeenth-century popular folklore did not exist in the language of the learned. When Stapleton referred to the growth of magia, this could mean anything from a rise in witchcraft among the common people to an increased interest in ceremonial magic or even Neoplatonic theurgy. For Protestant commentators in the vernacular, by contrast, the words used by ordinary people and their concerns were the starting-point for their views on witches, and this linguistic factor may go some way towards explaining why Protestants considered witchcraft a more dangerous problem than Catholics.68 The celebrated demonologist Martin Del Rio was teaching at the University of Louvain in 1594, and it is hard to imagine that someone with so much curiosity about the subject of magic would have missed Stapleton’s address. It is even possible that Del Rio was referring to Stapleton’s observations about heresy when he claimed that ‘Nothing has spread magic more quickly or more copiously in Scotland, England, France and Belgium

66

  Stapleton (1620), vol. 2, pp. 503–4.   Russell (1986), p. 28. 68   For discussions of the linguistic dimension of witchcraft, see Barry, J., ‘Public 67

infidelity and private belief? The discourse of Spirits in Enlightenment Bristol’, in Davies, O., and De Blécourt, W. (eds), Beyond the Witch-trials: Witchcraft and Magic in Enlightenment Europe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 117–143, at p. 117; Baroja (1990), pp. 19–22.

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than Calvinism.’69 However, when Del Rio brought out the first edition of his Disquisitiones Magicae in 1595, he addressed the problem of language head-on. Beginning with Hebrew etymologies, Del Rio carefully examined every word in sacred Scripture and Classical literature that could be taken as a reference to magic and attempted to define it. In contrast to Stapleton’s abstract condemnation of magia, Del Rio singled out real practices for condemnation as superstitious and demonstrated considerable knowledge of popular culture in his native Spain and the Low Countries. It is possible that Del Rio influenced English students at Louvain and at the University of Douai, where he was briefly appointed Professor of Theology in 1591,70 although there is no direct evidence of this. Robert Parsons seems to have shared Stapleton’s belief that witchcraft and heresy went hand-in-hand. In 1612, he accused the late Queen Elizabeth of witchcraft, or at least heavily implied such an accusation. He reported that in the Queen’s last days, one of her ladies-in-waiting discovered the Queen of Hearts pierced with a nail beneath her chair, while another of her ladies witnessed an apparition of the Queen that then disappeared, presumably projected by demonic agency (an instance of ‘spectral witchcraft’).71 Parsons was equally happy to deploy the accusation of witchcraft rhetorically against the Protestant clergy, claiming that ‘During the life of Queen Elizabeth one great Witch-craft of Ministers was, for bringing her asleep in the bed of careless security, to intoxicate her braine with excessive praises, and immoderate adulations.’ Now, Parsons argued, King James was being ‘bewitched’ in the same way.72 Parsons was prepared to take to its ultimate conclusion the theme of demonic subversion of government that Protestants could only hint at.73 Catholic literature reveals that a somewhat fluid distinction between rhetorical metaphor and reality existed where witchcraft was concerned, and whilst it is likely that nearly all Catholic authors believed in the reality of witchcraft, they found it most useful to deploy it as a metaphor for heresy. Whether or not Robert Parsons believed that Queen Elizabeth practised witchcraft, the point of his story was not so much to expose witchcraft but to illustrate the moral confusion engendered by the abandonment of the Catholic faith. Likewise, Stapleton’s Louvain address 69

  Del Rio (2000 [1595]), p. 28.   Maxwell-Stuart, P.G., ‘Introduction’, in Del Rio (2000 [1595]), pp. 4–5. 71   Parsons, R., A Discussion of the Answere of M. William Barlow, D. of 70

Divinity, to the Booke intituled: The Iudgment of a Catholike Englishman living in Banishment for his Religion (St Omer, 1612), pp. 218–19. 72   Ibid., p. 229. 73   On Protestant critiques of the government as demonic, see Johnstone (2006), p. 5.

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reads primarily as an attack on heretics for being as bad as magicians, rather than on magicians for being as bad as heretics. Direct attacks on witchcraft in England were not in Catholic interests and it is unsurprising that none were made. Accusations of witchcraft against Protestant clergy were rhetorical hyperbole and were not intended to stick. Indeed, the argument that Protestants were idolaters for holding heretical opinions was a subtle one compared with the more concrete Protestant accusation that Catholics were idolaters because they venerated images. It originated with Continental authors such as Martin Del Rio rather than English Catholics confronted with the reality of mission in a Protestant country;74 Catholic authors were wise not to press the point too far. Witchcraft, in England, was a Protestant obsession. The only Catholic authors to express moderate scepticism concerning the existence of witchcraft in the seventeenth century were the Blackloists, Kenelm Digby and Thomas White. In his Observations on Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici (1643), Digby distanced himself from Browne’s anti-Saducism, denying that unbelief in witchcraft was a slippery slope to atheism. Digby avoided denying the existence of witchcraft altogether but claimed that he had not yet seen sufficient evidence to convince him:75 I acknowledge ingenuously our Physicians experience hath the advantage of my Philosophy, in knowing there are witches. Yet I am sure, I have no temptation to doubt of the Deity; nor have any unsatisfaction in believing there are Spirits. I doe not see such a necessary conjunction betweene them, as that the supposition of the one, must needs inferre the other. Neither do I deny there are witches. I onely reserve my assent, till I meete with stronger motives to carry it.

Thomas White was suspicious of those who were too ready to attribute apparitions to witchcraft. The more fantastical tales became in the telling, the more people would be inclined to invoke witchcraft and magic to explain them: ‘For the most part, some falsity mingles with these revealed truths, which commonly gives the occasion of their being imputed to the black Art.’76 Although Digby and White were, on one level, the voices of the ‘radical Counter-Reformation’, advancing a strikingly modern brand of agnostic scepticism, they also harked back to the pre-modern church’s analysis of witchcraft as a vain delusion. Digby regarded Browne’s preoccupation with witchcraft as a symptom of his uncertainty concerning religious truths; if the truth of God’s existence was not evident, 74

  Clark (1997), pp. 534–7.   Digby, K., Observations upon Religio medici occasionally written by Sir

75

Kenelme Digby, Knight (London, 1643), pp. 36–7. 76   White (1659), p. 190.

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physical proof that witchcraft existed at least proved a spiritual world. However, for the Blackloists, there was no such doubt and uncertainty, and consequently there was no reason for them to be interested in the preternatural as confirmation of the divine. Catholics as Witches in Reformation England By the beginning of the seventeenth century, it was virtually a cliché for Protestant authors to describe Catholic practices as ‘witchcraft’. Less commonly, Catholics themselves were described as ‘witches’.77 That such language was used by the opponents of Catholicism is undeniable. However, since witchcraft was a crime from 1563, we should expect to see legal action being taken against Catholics as witches, if this was anything more than rhetoric. In fact, rhetoric did not translate into reality and Catholics were not prosecuted under the Witchcraft Act. Nathan Johnstone has suggested that Protestant efforts to portray the mass and other Catholic ceremonies as naked demonic magic were largely a failure. The Reformers were forced to concede that the devil successfully maintained the illusion of Christian worship in Catholic liturgy, and they came to concentrate on the wickedness of ‘false doctrine’ in Catholicism rather than on its ceremonies as witchcraft.78 However, Norman Jones has argued that the Witchcraft Act of 1563 came about on account of a group of Catholics plotting to kill Queen Elizabeth in 1561, who could not be punished under existing legislation. The supposed plot was uncovered on 14 April 1561 when a former monk, John Coxe (alias Devon) was arrested at Gravesend carrying messages to Catholic exiles. Under questioning, he revealed that a group of Essex recusants was planning to install a Catholic succession based on ‘the prophecies of sorcerers’ who were Catholic priests. He also admitted to saying mass at the home of a prebendary of Winchester Cathedral, Leonard Bilson, ‘for hallowing of certain conjurations to those of the said Bilson who practised by those means to obtain the love of my Lady Cotton, the wife of Sir Richard Cotton, Knight’.79 In response to Coxe’s revelations, the Privy Council issued a commission to the Earl of Oxford ‘to enquire for mass mongerers and conjurers’. The commission discovered that Arthur Pole, a nephew of Cardinal Pole, was planning to marry the Earl of Northumberland’s sister and declare himself King, and 77

  On these Protestant polemics, see Wills, G., Witches and Jesuits: Shakespeare’s Macbeth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 35–6; Clark (1997), pp. 533–4; Davies (2007a), pp. 35–6; Oldridge (2010), p. 177. 78   Johnstone (2006), p. 43. 79   Jones (1998), p. 192.

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that ‘conjurers’ had performed acts of divination to find out how long the Queen would reign and how long the religious settlement would last. The Bishop of Aquila, the Spanish Ambassador, reported that Elizabeth was convinced that the Catholic nobility were ‘conjuring and conspiring against her’. Six or eight clerics, including two Oxford doctors, were imprisoned ‘for using necromancy and conjuring demons in order to kill the queen’. Astrological calculations of the nativities of Elizabeth and Dudley were found in their possession.80 Coxe was convicted of saying mass, whilst Arthur and Edmund Pole were found guilty of treason. However, none of the three could be charged with conjuration. Edmund Grindal, the Bishop of London, was particularly shocked by Coxe’s use of the mass for making a love charm, and suggested to William Cecil that ‘surely for this magic and conjurations your honours of the Council must appoint some extraordinary punishment for example. My Lord Chief Justice saith the corporal law will not meddle with them. Our ecclesiastical punishment is too slender for such grievous affairs.’ Cecil turned to the Chief Justice, Robert Catlyn, who confirmed that Coxe could not be convicted of conjuration. Jones saw this as the moment when the Privy Council began to consider legislating against witchcraft. Subsequent events ensured that the Witchcraft Act became part of a ‘package’ of laws, including the Treason Act of 1563 and the Act against Prophesying, that were ‘part of a drive to control the evils that the queen’s Catholic enemies, and her great enemy Satan, might work against her’.81 For Jones, the involvement of the priest-conjurer Coxe with Catholic conspirators provided Elizabeth’s ministers with ‘proof of the Satanic intent of Catholics’. This in turn was the outworking of a ‘logical imperative’ inherent in Protestant theology: ‘The Pope and his brood were Antichrist … Thus anything done by Rome was done on behalf of and with the consent of Satan. Ergo, Catholics were in a pact with the devil like witches. Priests, therefore, were conjurers and everyone who followed them was bewitched.’82 Conjurer-priests were undoubtedly excellent propaganda for Elizabeth’s regime, but the events of 1561–63 do not demonstrate that witchcraft was criminalized because the Elizabethan regime saw Catholics and Catholicism as demonic. The Witchcraft Act was primarily concerned with those who caused death by the invocation of evil spirits, whether by witchcraft or conjuration. The Act did not define witchcraft and conjuration as the same thing. Furthermore, since the 1563 Act did not define witchcraft as a pact, Jones overstated the

80

  Ibid., pp. 190–91.   Jones (1998), p. 200. 82   Ibid., p. 188. 81

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case when he claimed that ‘Catholics were in a pact with the devil’ in the Protestant imagination. There was nothing new in Elizabeth’s concern that her political enemies might try to assassinate her by means of magic. Casting the monarch’s horoscope had long been a crime, and the majority of major witchcraft cases in late mediaeval England involved attempts on the life of the monarch by means of sorcery.83 Indeed, Elizabeth’s government was merely echoing the concerns of the previous Marian administration. In May 1555, the young John Dee, along with three other men, apparently used ‘the unlawful arts of conjuring and witchcraft’ to calculate Queen Mary’s horoscope and that of her child (she was thought to be pregnant at the time). A commission was convened to investigate the conjurers’ ‘lewd and vain practices’, and in August, Dee and the others were released until Christmas on condition of their good behaviour.84 Although astrology was regarded by many of the learned as well as the unlearned as a legitimate and valuable art, astrologers who dared to make predictions concerning matters of state were always vulnerable to criticism, and unwise predictions by astrologers could precipitate theological attacks on the legitimacy of astrology from Catholics and Protestants alike.85 Whether astrology was ‘conjuration’ or not depended on who was casting a horoscope and when, rather than on the nature of the divination practised. Jones acknowledged that direct evidence of a link between the passing of the Witchcraft Act and the conjurations of the Essex recusants was lacking,86 yet he did not hesitate to draw a connection between the supposedly antiCatholic motivation of the Act and the prosecution of Agnes Waterhouse for witchcraft in 1566, the Essex woman who admitted that she could only say her prayers in Latin.87 However, had the intent of the Witchcraft Act 83

  See Carey, H.M., Courting Disaster: Astrology at the English Court and University in the Later Middle Ages (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 1992), pp. 138–53. 84   Strype, J., Ecclesiastical Memorials (Oxford, 1822), vol. 3:1, pp. 348–9; Clulee, N.H., John Dee’s Natural Philosophy: between Science and Religion (London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 33–4. 85   See, for instance, Calvin, J. (trans. ‘G.G.’), An Admonicion against Astrology Iudiciall (London, 1561); Bodin (1581), p. 34. On Catholic opposition to astrology, see Thorndike, L., A History of Magic and Experimental Science (New York: Columbia University Press, 1923–58), vol. 4, pp. 196–9; Racaut, L., ‘A Protestant or Catholic Superstition? Astrology and Eschatology during the French Wars of Religion’, in Naphy and Parish (2002), pp. 154–69; Cameron (2010), p. 190. 86   Jones (1998), p. 200. 87   Ibid., p. 187. On Agnes Waterhouse, see The Examination and Confession of Certain Wytches at Chensford in the Countie of Essex ... Anno 1566, reprinted in Ewen, C.L., Witchcraft and Demonianism (London: Heath Cranton, 1933), p. 324.

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been anti-Catholic, we might expect to see prosecutions of individuals of considerably higher social status than Waterhouse in the succeeding years. In reality, apart from her attachment to Marian prayers, Waterhouse was a typical English victim of witchcraft legislation, a marginalized figure of low social status. She was not a recusant and she was certainly no threat to the life of the Queen. The idea that Elizabeth’s criminalization of treason by sorcery was imbued with a specifically anti-Catholic subtext is not supported by the evidence. Rather, Elizabeth’s government was responding to the renewal of an old threat, the assassination of the monarch by magic. Since the Queen’s enemies were Catholics, Catholics were likely to threaten her life, but there is no evidence that anyone thought they were more likely to use magic because they were Catholics. Attacks on prophecy, astrology and conjuration as threats to the state were part of an older, pre-Reformation rhetoric and had little to do with Protestant interpretations of Catholicism. These issues were as much a matter of concern to the Marian regime as the Elizabethan, and a Marian bishop would have been no less horrified than Grindal was, that John Coxe used the mass for love magic. The extent to which prophecy and divination were threats to the state did not depend on confessional factors. Rather, prophecy was attractive to any marginalized group as a means of undermining the political status quo. Protestant martyrs prophesied Queen Mary’s downfall, just as clerical opponents of the Henrician Reformation, ‘evicted from the centre of power’, had been forced to turn to prophecy and divination (which they had previously condemned) in order to make themselves heard.88 However, the lenient treatment of Dee and his fellow ‘conjurers’ in 1555 suggests that sorcery was a matter of lesser concern to Mary’s Catholic regime than it was to Elizabeth and her successors. By the end of the first decade of Elizabeth’s reign, Protestant propaganda had indeed established a ‘broad connection’ between Catholicism and magic.89 In his Epistle of the Persecution of Catholickes in England (1582), Robert Parsons acknowledged this aspect of anti-Catholic propaganda, complaining of ‘that ridiculous and wanton maner of chatting of oure adversaries … in slaundering Catholiques to be of familiar acquaintance with devills’. He hinted at a widespread strategy of discrediting Catholics: ‘I might sooner lacke time tha[n] matter, yf I should recken upp all the surmises, and fables whiche they have forged, touching this point.’90 However, Parsons did provide one example of a priest who was accused of 88

  Dobin, H., Merlin’s Disciples: Prophecy, Poetry and Power in Renaissance England (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), pp. 41–4. 89   Jones (1998), p. 190. 90   Parsons, R., An Epistle of the Persecution of Catholickes in England (Douai [Rouen], 1582), p. 148.

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being the devil himself. The priest attended the deathbed of a Catholic man who confessed an unpaid debt to a Protestant. The dying man wanted to repay the debt anonymously, so the priest rode away to find the Protestant creditor and gave him the money he was owed, asking him not to enquire about where it came from or why. However, as the priest was leaving he was waylaid, taken captive and accused of being the devil:91 … they made this surmise against hym, that forsothe he is not a man but a devill, whiche had brought money of his owne making to bewitch the olde man. And for a proofe there of, they used this argument among others, that he had a blacke horse. And this horse they dyd observe & watche diligentlye whether he dyd eate haye as other horses eate or no. And as for the priest, they put a horse lock aboute his legg, shutt hym up close in a strong cha[m]ber, and appointed a felow to be with hym continually bothe day and night, which shoulde watche yf he dyd put offe his bootes at any time, & if his feete were like horsefete, or that he were cloue[n] footed: or had fete flyt and forked as beasts have. For this they affirmed to be a speciall marke whereby to know the devill, when he lyeth lurking under the shape and likenesse of a man. Then the people assembled aboute the house in greate nu[m]bres, and profered money largelie that they might see this monstre with their own eyes. For by this time, the people are persuaded that he is in dede an yll spirite or a verie devill. For what man was ever heard of (say they) whiche (yf he had the mynde, understanding and sense of a man) woolde of his own voluntarie will and withoute anie respect or consideration at all geve or proffer suche a summe of money to a man utterlie unknowen, of no acquaintance with hym, and a mere straunger of an other countrie.

The priest’s accusers drew on cultural stereotypes of the devil to furnish an excuse for keeping him prisoner; the devil was a stranger who rode a black horse and offered people money. However, there was an inherent irony in the fact that Protestants regarded the priest, who had done an act of charity towards a dying man, as a ‘monstre’. This revealed their own moral distance from the priest and confirmed Parsons’s argument that Catholics were now strangers in their own land. Parsons implicitly mocked the credulity of people who believed the priest had cloven feet under his boots. However, as Parsons revealed, the priest could not be confined as the object of curiosity forever. He was released but subsequently waylaid by an informant who accused him of high treason. The priest was subsequently arrested and imprisoned for several months in the Tower of London. It is possible that the accusations of diabolism originally made against the priest were intended to gain time so that someone could be found to inform against him as a priest and a traitor.

91

  Ibid., pp. 145–7.

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Parsons noted that Catholics had also been accused of witchcraft and sorcery. Following the lightning strike on St Paul’s in 1561 that caused a fire in the cathedral, ‘certein charmes or inchauntments, and devises of witchecraft wound up together in peeces of parchement with figures, characters & suche like fond toyes’ were found buried nearby. Protestants ‘were not a shamed to say that it was done by Iuglings and coniurings practised by Catholiques’. Even when it turned out that the culprit was a Protestant minister, it was suggested that he was a secret Catholic.92 Parsons also recalled the case of Rowland Jenks, a Catholic bookbinder who was convicted of sedition at the Oxford Quarter Sessions in July 1577. According to Parsons, the outbreak of gaol fever that killed most of those involved in convicting Jenks (‘a wonder full Iudgement of God undowbtedlie’) was ‘imputed to magike and sorcerie, as practised by Catholiques’.93 If Protestants accused Jenks or other Catholics of witchcraft at the time, no evidence survives of this. John Stowe’s Annales simply recorded that an outbreak of gaol fever occurred at the time of Jenks’s trial, with no hint of a supernatural element.94 The idea that someone had raised a damp by magic that caused the fever was first alluded to by a woman who employed a conjurer to exact vengeance on her husband’s enemies in 1589, but Jenks’s involvement was not mentioned.95 By 1636, Thomas Cogan was claiming that Jenks raised the mysterious mist ‘within the Castle yard and court house’ which caused the illness, thus implying an element of witchcraft.96 However, neither of these two sources mentioned that Jenks was a Catholic or made a connection between his Catholicism and alleged witchcraft. One Catholic who was widely believed to be a witch, although never formally accused as such, was Mary Villiers, Countess of Buckingham, the mother of the Duke of Buckingham who was murdered in 1628. However, belief in the involvement of Buckingham’s household in the black arts focused variously on the Duke himself, his mother and his astrologer, John Lambe.97 A pamphlet described Lambe’s servant Anne Bodenham, tried for witchcraft in 1653, as ‘much adicted to Popery, and to Papistical fancies that she commonly observed’, but here ‘popery’ was a cipher for superstition in general. There was nothing in Anne Bodenham’s

92

Ibid., pp. 148–9. Ibid., p. 150. On the Jenks case, see Walsham (1999), pp. 234–5. Stowe, J., The Annales of England (London, 1592), p. 1165. CSPD 1581–90, p. 391. Cogan, T., The Haven of Health (London, 1636), p. 318. See also Wanley, N., The Wonders of the Little World (London, 1673), p. 60. 97   Johnstone (2006), p. 202.     94   95   96   93

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belief in lucky and unlucky days and her use of charms and spells to suggest that she actually attended Catholic services.98 The cases described by Parsons reveal that, even before Reginald Scot systematically compared Catholic rites with ceremonial magic in his Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), the idea of damning Catholics as addicted to witchcraft had taken hold. However, Scot was a sceptic who had no fear of witches, and his particular brand of anti-Catholic discourse originated as mockery of Catholicism for its empty ceremonies rather than genuine fear that Catholicism was of the devil. Even among puritans who rejected Scot’s scepticism, and even after that same scepticism fell out of favour with the Church of England after the Restoration, the association between popery and witchcraft is best compared with the learned polemics against the ‘witchcraft’ of cunning-folk. Such polemics, albeit vitriolic, did not reflect popular beliefs about witches. Most importantly, literary attacks on Catholics as witches never translated into judicial action. Ordinary people had a very clear idea of who witches were, and religious faith had little or nothing to do with it. The notion that Catholics were actively suspected of witchcraft in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England can ultimately be traced to the overtly anti-Catholic asides of Cecil L’Estrange Ewen in his still important collection of sources relating to English witch trials.99 Reginald TrevorDavies maintained in the 1940s that Elizabethan Catholics were suspected of witchcraft,100 claiming that wax figures of Queen Elizabeth, Cecil and the Earl of Leicester were found in the house of a Catholic priest at Islington in 1578. Trevor-Davies derived this story from Meric Casaubon, who claimed that wax effigies were found ‘in the house of a Priest’.101 In fact, Casaubon’s story was taken from Jean Bodin:102 [A story] is also newly arrived concerning an English magician priest, and the vicar of a village, which is called Istincton [sic.], who was found in September 1578 in the possession of three magical wax images, in order to bring about the death of the Queen of England, and two others close to her person.

98

  Bower, E., Doctor Lamb Revived (London, 1653), p. 1.   Ewen suggested, for example, that the ‘devils in black’ who appeared to

99

numerous witchcraft suspects were lecherous Catholic priests (Ewen (1933), p. 66). 100   Trevor-Davies, R., Four Centuries of Witch-Beliefs (London: Methuen, 1947), p. 21. 101   Casaubon, M., Of Credulity and Incredulity in Things Natural, Civil and Divine (London, 1668), p. 93. 102   Bodin, J., De la démonomanie des sorcières (Paris, 1581), Preface.

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Although Bodin used the term ‘Prestre’ rather than ‘ministre’, his description of the magician as ‘Curé d’un village’ makes it clear that he was a clergyman of the established church, not a Catholic priest. In any case, Bodin remarked that the story had only just arrived in France and had not yet been verified. Trevor-Davies’s claim of an association between Catholicism and witchcraft proved influential. In 1975, Christopher Haigh argued that, in Reformation Lancashire, ‘There was a connection between assumed wizardry and assumed conservatism’ on the somewhat flimsy grounds that two Protestant clergy accused of sorcery were also lenient towards recusants, and that half of the known witchcraft prosecutions in the county originated in the strongly Catholic Deanery of Warrington. Furthermore, ‘The use of charms and Catholicism tended to go together.’103 Whilst both sorcery and charming fell under the 1604 Witchcraft Act, neither sorcery nor charming was maleficium nor, indeed, witchcraft in the eyes of local people. Admittedly, Haigh did not explicitly claim that Catholics were more likely to be accused of witchcraft, and the evidence of the Samlesbury witch trial, examined in more detail below, suggests exactly the opposite. In spite of criticism from MacFarlane, Thomas and Aveling,104 the notion that witch-hunting and persecution of Catholics were somehow linked still persists, for example, in Malcolm Gaskill’s recent study of the great East Anglian witch-hunt of the 1640s. Gaskill’s interpretation of the witch-hunt is decidedly ecclesio-political: ‘In Suffolk … the salient characteristic of the places targeted by the witchfinders was not parliamentarian dominance but local conflict with royalist, and in many cases Catholic, traditionalists.’105 Gaskill goes on to suggest, on the basis of no apparent evidence, that both Matthew Hopkins and William Dowsing bore a particular animosity towards the Catholic Timperleys of Hintlesham in Suffolk, and that ‘The four women interrogated at Hintlesham may have belonged to this island of spiritual resistance.’106 In reality, the fact that the Timperleys were Catholics did not make it any more or less likely that Hopkins would hunt for witches at Hintlesham or that Dowsing would deface superstitious inscriptions on Timperley tombs. The witchfinder John Stearne, whose puritan convictions were more obvious than those of Hopkins, came from the village of Lawshall, where the landlords were the Catholic Rookwoods. In a county like Suffolk, Catholics and the godly lived cheek-by-jowl, and a Catholic landlord did not mean that Hintlesham was an ‘island of spiritual resistance’ to 103

    105   106   104

Haigh (1975), p. 322. MacFarlane (1970), p. 188; Thomas (1991), p. 598; Aveling (1980), p. 95. Gaskill (2005), p. 80. Ibid., p. 101.

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the Reformation. Indeed, this is extremely unlikely. The 1676 Compton Census of religious belief (the first time all Catholics, regardless of social status, were counted) clearly shows that there were no rural ‘islands’ of Catholicism. Instead, Catholics were primarily concentrated in market towns such as Bury St Edmunds and Eye.107 It is likely that the pattern of Suffolk Catholicism in the late seventeenth century was very similar to what it was in the 1640s. Elmer’s suggestion that support for witch-hunting in Suffolk was primarily influenced by hatred of Bishop Matthew Wren of Ely in the Archdeaconry of Suffolk is far more plausible than the idea that the witchfinders had a vendetta against Catholics. More often than not, Arminian prelates and incumbents rather than the unobtrusive and scattered Catholics of the county were the real objects of popular ‘anti-popery’. The cleansing of witches from a godly area was ‘a prelude to the re-creation of a new godly order’.108 Catholics, who played no part in civil life, were paradoxically no threat to the godly commonwealth. On the other hand, a non-preaching incumbent such as the unfortunate John Lowes, who stood at the centre of his local community, was a legitimate target.109 When it comes to Essex, Gaskill again asserts that anti-Catholicism was a factor; St Osyth was, apparently, ‘a town with strong Catholic traditions’.110 However, the presence of a mediaeval cult centre in the past and a Catholic landowner at the time of the witch-hunt does nothing to demonstrate that the town itself was in any sense ‘Catholic’. MacFarlane, in a study devoted to witchcraft in Essex, has demonstrated that not a single one of those accused of witchcraft is known to have been a Catholic. If any one of them had been a ‘reputed papist’ then we might expect to find this mentioned in the ecclesiastical court presentments or in contemporary pamphlets.111 The supposition that Essex witches were somehow Catholic derives from a feature of the case of Agnes Waterhouse, the first woman to be executed under the Witchcraft Act of 1564. Agnes made use of Latin charms and claimed that the devil would not let her use any other language. However, unless Catholicism is conflated with sub-Catholic survivalism, her use of Latin prayers (especially as early as 1566) does not prove that Agnes was a self-conscious Catholic. Of 62 people presented for recusancy at the two county Quarter Sessions in 1582, not one of them was also

107   Whiteman, A. and Clapinson A. (eds), The Compton Census of 1676: A Critical Edition (London: British Academy, 1986), pp. 235, 237. 108   Elmer (2001), p. 109. 109   Gaskill (2005), pp. 138–44. 110   Ibid., p. 28. 111   MacFarlane (1970), p. 188.

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presented for witchcraft.112 Whilst presentations for recusancy do not give an accurate representation of the numbers of Catholics in any given county, the presentations of 1582 were thorough in comparison with other years. The evidence for any crossover between witchcraft and recusancy allegations in Essex is lacking. The supposed puritan and anti-Catholic beliefs of witchfinders, along with the fact that Catholics were a marginalized and excluded section of society, has given rise to the view among some scholars that because Catholics should have been suspected of witchcraft, they were. According to Frederick Valletta, ‘Catholicism was strongly linked to the practice of witchcraft, and … its followers were often in danger of being accused of witchcraft.’113 Maurice Hunt argued that William Weston’s use of Edmund Campion’s thumb in exorcisms was perceived by a Jacobean audience as equivalent to the use of body parts in the spells of Macbeth’s witches,114 while Boria Sax claimed that the witch-hunters deliberately parodied the stigmata with the ‘devil’s mark’ and regarded the intercession of the familiar with the devil as a parody of the intercession of saints.115 Marion Gibson proposed that, since ‘witches were associated with Catholics’ in the seventeenth century, it was politically dangerous not to prosecute them.116 In the absence of any real evidence that accusations of witchcraft were ever made against people because they were Catholic, these suggestions seem to be grounded in wishful thinking rather than historical reality. Since no English Catholic was ever tried for witchcraft, the Protestant polemic against Catholicism as ‘witchcraft’ must be treated with great caution. Often Protestant texts were the mirror image of Robert Parsons and Thomas Stapleton’s rhetorical equation of witchcraft with Protestantism. When they were not intended as metaphor, such attacks were grounded in Scot’s condemnation of Catholic priests as ‘conjurers’; they were certainly not serious accusations of pact witchcraft. By the middle of the seventeenth century, the equation of popery with magic was thoroughly conventional and did not require supporting evidence. When he was interviewed by Richard Baddely about his exorcism by Catholic priests, William Perry 112

  Essex Record Office, Q/SR 79/100; Cockburn, J.S. (ed.), Calendar of Assize Records: Elizabeth I (London: HMSO, 1978), vol. 3, pp. 1300–41 113   Valletta, F., Witchcraft, Magic and Superstition in England, 1640–70 (Ashgate: Aldershot, 2000), p. 22. 114   Hunt, M., ‘Reformation/Counter-Reformation Macbeth’, English Studies 86 (2005), pp. 379–98, at p. 385. 115   Sax, B., ‘The Magic of Animals: English Witch Trials in the Perspective of Folklore’, Anthrozoös 22 (2009), pp. 317–32, at pp. 320, 322. 116   Gibson, M., Possession, Puritanism and Print: Darrell, Harsnett, Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Exorcism Controversy (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2006), p. 94.

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called holy water ‘witch water’.117 However, when Thomas Ady inveighed against ‘the Popish Clergy, the Witches of these latter times’ in 1655 he did so ironically.118 Ady was a sceptic concerning witchcraft and his argument was a continuation of Reginald Scot’s. The point was not that Catholics were witches but that witchcraft was a Catholic fabrication, and the true ‘witches’ were therefore priests who encouraged the use of superstitious charms.119 As Elmer has expressed it, ‘Society was cleansed of its Catholic past not so much by an attack on Catholics as witches, but rather through the elaboration in pamphlets, sermons and charges to grand juries of the inherently diabolical and superstitious nature of the old faith.’120 In other words, the hurling of the witchcraft insult at Catholics achieved the indirect purpose of discrediting Catholic doctrine and practice. No one ever thought that Catholics were actually witches, although some puritans certainly believed that Catholicism was demonic.121 Witchcraft versus Recusancy: The Case of the Samlesbury Witches On 19 August 1612, at the assizes held in Lancaster Castle, a 14-year-old girl, Grace Sowerbutts, stood up to testify against her grandmother Jennet Bierley, her aunt Ellen Bierley and Jane Southworth, the Protestant widow of the son of Sir John Southworth of Samlesbury Hall, a leading recusant. Grace claimed that ‘about halfe a yeare agoe’ her grandmother took her to the south bank of the river Ribble, where they met with the other two women. Out of the water came ‘foure black things, going upright, and yet not like men in the face’ that carried them over the water to Red Bank, on the north side of the river. There they feasted, danced and copulated with the ‘black things’: After they had eaten, the said three Women and this Examinate danced, every one of them with one of the black things aforesaid, and after their dancing the said black things did pull downe the said three Women, and did abuse their bodies, as this Examinate thinketh, for shee saith, that the black thing that was with her, did abuse her bodie.

117

  Baddely (1622), p. 63.   Ady, T., A Candle in the Dark (London, 1655), p. 56. 119   Ady was, in any case, referring to Irish rather than English Catholics when

118

he made this remark. 120   Elmer (2001), p. 106. See also Oldridge (2010), p. 21. 121   Oldridge (2010), pp. 23, 44. On the demonic potential of Catholicism, see also A Pittilesse Mother (London, 1617) and Johnstone (2006), pp. 157–8, 168–9

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This happened every Thursday and Sunday night for a fortnight. On the north side of the river, Grace and the three women were joined by ‘divers other women … some old, some young’ who did not eat the food, dance, or copulate with the black things but looked on. Thereafter, Grace was repeatedly harassed by her grandmother in human and canine form. Jennet transported her to the top of hayricks and the bottom of ditches, leaving her senseless and unable to speak. One night, the women took Grace with them to the home of Thomas Walshman and entered the room where he and his wife were sleeping with a child. Jennet picked up the child and ‘after the said Iennet Bierley had set her downe by the fire, with the said child, shee did thrust a naile into the navell of the said child: and afterwards did take a pen and put it in at the said place, and did suck there a good space, and afterwards laid the child in bed againe.’ The child sickened and died, but the women returned to Samlesbury churchyard and dug up the body. Jennet carried the body back to her house and ‘did boile some therof in a Pot’ which she and the other witches ate. They then boiled up the bones, ‘& with the Fat that came out of the said bones, they said they would annoint themselves, that thereby they might sometimes change themselves into other shapes.’ On 4 April 1612, Jennet appeared to her granddaughter in the form of a black dog walking on two legs and urged Grace to throw herself into a pit, but Grace was saved when ‘there came one to her in a white sheete, and carried her away from the said Pitte, upon the comming whereof the said blacke Dogge departed away; and shortly after the said white thing departed also.’ Once Grace had concluded her testimony, Thomas Walshman confirmed that a child of his had indeed died. The outlook for the accused women seemed bleak, and Grace’s father declared that they were ‘more worthy to die then any of these Witches’. However, the trial took an unexpected turn. William Alker testified that Sir John Southworth (who was then in prison for recusancy) said that he thought Ellen Bierley might bewitch him. The prosecution case was starting to hinge on the second-hand testimony of a recusant,122 and it was at this point that the judge Edward Bromley began to suspect the involvement of a Catholic priest or schoolmaster (most likely a priest playing the role of schoolmaster) known as Master Thompson or Master Christopher Southworth.123 The judge asked Grace if she had been 122

  Poole, R., The Lancashire Witches: Histories and Stories (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), p. 32 suggests that the local knowledge of the magistrate Sir Roger Nowell, who was engaged in a long-running feud with the Southworths, provided the information about Thompson. 123   Probably the Christopher Southworth ordained in 1583 (Bellenger, p. 110), the fourth son of Sir John Southworth, who was captured in 1587 and imprisoned at Wisbech Castle. Southworth escaped from Wisbech in March 1600 along with five other priests (Anstruther (1956), pp. 67–9).

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instructed by a schoolmaster, and whether he had induced her to make the allegations against the women. Grace, ‘strangely amazed, told him, shee was put to a Master to learne, but he told her nothing of this’. The judge declared, ‘That if a Priest or Jesuit had a hand in one end of it, there would appeare to bee knaverie, and practise in the other end of it’. In other words, the fact that a priest was involved meant that there could not be genuine witchcraft present. Neither Grace nor her father would admit that she had been told to fabricate the story by Southworth, and it was left to others to make the accusation: In the end, some that were present told his Lordship the truth, and the Prisoners informed him how shee went to learne with one Thompson a Seminarie Priest, who had instructed and taught her this accusation against them, because they were once obstinate Papists, and now came to Church. Here is the discoverie of this Priest, and of his whole practise. Still this fire encreased more and more, and one witnesse accusing an other, all things were laid open at large.

Grace was committed to the care of a Protestant preacher, and at the next Assizes she confessed ‘that one Master Thompson, which she taketh to be Master Christopher Southworth, to whom shee was sent to learne her prayers, did perswade, counsell, and advise her, to deale as formerly hath beene said against her said Grand-mother, Aunt, and Southworths wife’. Jennet Bierley and the other women confirmed the new story, accusing Southworth of teaching Grace to fabricate the charge against them because they went to church. The trial of the Samlesbury witches was a defining event in the development of anti-Catholic rhetoric. It represented the triumph of the idea that Catholics were fakers of the supernatural over the suggestion that Catholic priests were sorcerers in league with the devil. The trial thus had far-reaching consequences for the Catholic community. On the one hand, it ensured that no Catholic was likely to be tried for witchcraft, but on the other it encouraged anti-Catholic pamphleteers to unearth or fabricate evidence to suggest that the missionary clergy were engaged in a campaign of fraudulent exorcisms and hauntings for more than a century thereafter. The trial of the Samlesbury witches was publicized by the Clerk of the Court, Thomas Potts, in The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster (1613). However, the Samlesbury trial was not the only witch-trial in Lancaster in the summer of 1612. The parallel trial of the Pendle witches took a very different course, and the accused women were convicted and hanged. The Pendle trial, unlike the Samlesbury case, prominently featured sub-Catholic survivalism rather than recusancy. ‘Old Chattox’, one of the Pendle accused, used charms derived from Latin

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prayers. Whereas the ‘new’ Counter-Reformation Catholicism manifested itself in the form of the deceits and sharp practices of Jesuits and other missionary priests, the ‘old’ Catholicism was allied with the devil. It is likely that these two manifestations of Catholicism as ‘old’ and ‘new’ were blurred in the minds of ordinary people in Lancashire, many of whom went through periods of conformity and recusancy in their lives and had a limited understanding of Reformation controversy. However, for the learned on both sides of the denominational divide, the distinction between vulgar popish superstition and militant Counter-Reformation faith was a clear one, and it is misleading to describe gentry recusancy as ‘a more sophisticated and organised form of Catholic survivalism’.124 Popish superstition was largely a lay phenomenon at the edge of society, and consequently it was vulnerable to reinterpretation as witchcraft by both Protestants and Catholics. Missionary Catholicism demanded that practices be clerically sanctioned at the very least; the exorcist of William Perry was adamant that the blessed oil and water he left behind could not be used by cunning-folk.125 Although Protestants were ready to portray Catholics as ignorant and accuse them indiscriminately of superstition, Potts’s account reveals that this rhetorical strategy did not translate into practical action. When it came to the legal process, witchcraft and the activities of missionary priests were not only dealt with but also conceived of quite separately. John Gee may have dropped hints that Jesuits used witchcraft to fake apparitions of ghosts, but the view that priestly frauds were nothing more than cynical performances and manipulation came to dominate at the Samlesbury trial. If this view, which provided considerable potential for satire and mockery, were to hold sway successfully, the presence of the supernatural in the dealings of Catholic priests had to be systematically denied. Claims of witchcraft that originated from Catholic sources, such as the priest’s account of the exorcism of the ‘Boy of Bilson’ and the testimony of Grace Sowerbutts against the Samlesbury witches, were automatically false. Deborah Lea has drawn attention to the hypocrisy of Potts’s account, which discredited the same kind of fantastic evidence in the Samlesbury that was used to convict the Pendle witches.126 Anti-Catholicism cancelled out faith in possession and witchcraft. Potts was effectively engaged in two separate anti-Catholic discourses when he reported the trials of the Lancashire witches. On the one hand, he invited his readers to be shocked by the use of ‘Catholic’ charms by the Pendle witches, thus proving Reginald Scot’s point that Catholic rites were nothing more than conjurations. On the other hand, he invited his readers 124

  Lea (2011), p. 123.   Baddely (1622), p. 53. 126   Lea (2011), p. 121. 125

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scornfully to dismiss the idea that accusations of witchcraft raised against three Samlesbury women at the instigation of a Catholic priest could be true. These discourses should not be confused, nor should their juxtaposition in a single work give the impression that the Catholic mission in Lancashire was especially tolerant of sub-Catholic superstition. Diane Purkiss’s observation that ‘culturally subjugated knowledges of the supernatural are open to one another’ (that is, knowledge of Catholic prayers could merge with knowledge of witchcraft) holds true only if the intellectual and liturgical gulf that existed between half-remembered pre-Reformation traditions and the Counter-Reformation mission in England is recognized. Some of the Pendle witches, under questioning, confessed to the use of Latin and English charms apparently containing Catholic elements. For example, Jennet Device said that her mother taught her the charm ‘Crucifixus hoc signum vitam Eternam. Amen’ in order to ‘get drinke’ by supernatural means, as well as a lengthy charm of unbewitchment that contained references to specifically Catholic ideas, such as fasting on Good Friday, ‘Lord in his messe’, ‘crizum’ and ‘rood’. However, these charms were so garbled that Purkiss was probably correct to see them as compilations of half-remembered snatches of Mystery Plays, which in some parts of the north continued into the 1570s.127 Such a charm was ‘a decaying record of half-forgotten history … reduced to its power as sound by a process of forgetting its former context’.128 Although charming was technically illegal under the Witchcraft Act of 1604, it was placed in a different category to witchcraft itself. The fact that the old women of Pendle used sub-Catholic charms did not prove that they were witches, but it did prove to informed Protestants that they were the kind of people, spiritually weakened by ungodliness, on whom the devil was most likely to prey. As Purkiss has pointed out, we do not know the exact nature of the leading questions that these women were asked, but if anti-Catholic judges and magistrates expected to find evidence of popish superstition then the judicial procedures of the time meant that they probably would.129 A key accusation against the Pendle witches was that they had all attended a ‘grand council’ of witches at Malkin Tower on Good Friday. Jessica Lofthouse’s suggestion that Alice Nutter refused to admit her whereabouts on Good Friday because she had been at a Good Friday mass, and ‘to have confessed this would have implicated a priest and other Roman Catholics’ does not seem likely.130 Deborah Lea has suggested that the witches were accused of plotting to blow up Lancaster Castle as a means of assimilating 127

    129   130   128

Purkiss (1996), p. 158. Ibid., p. 156. Ibid., p. 158. Lofthouse (1976), pp. 67–8.

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them to the stereotype of Catholic gunpowder plotters.131 However, there is no evidence to suggest that any of the Lancashire witches were victims of anti-Catholic hatred, accused of witchcraft because their real crime was recusancy. In Lancashire of all counties, being a Catholic did not alienate a person from her community; indeed, if there was any truth at all in the accusations against Grace Sowerbutts, quite the opposite was true and going to church could lead to rejection by one’s neighbours. The trial of the Samlesbury witches was virtually unique, in that the suspicion that a Catholic priest had been involved led to the acquittal of all three women and demonstrated that in Lancashire, the imperative of combating Catholicism trumped the need to stamp out witchcraft. It is unlikely, however, that the trial was staged deliberately in order to discredit Catholics. The outcome of the trial proved to Protestant readers not that witches were Catholic or that Catholics were witches, but that Catholics counterfeited possessions and made false accusations of witchcraft. Had this approach been applied to all witch trials then the reality of witchcraft itself would have been under threat and the majority Protestant view that witchcraft was real would have collapsed. However, this unusual trial should be seen as part of Archbishop Richard Bancroft’s campaign against exorcists, rather than as a blow to witch-hunting in general; Bancroft’s aim was ‘not to save witches, but to crush exorcists’.132 Grace Sowerbutts may or may not have been instructed by the priest Southworth to accuse her Protestant relatives of witchcraft. However, the allegations she made were unusual in English witch trials, and suggest that the direct or indirect influence of Continental demonological literature was present in the Samlesbury case. Grace described a gathering of witches on Red Bank that resembled the Continental witches’ Sabbath, in so far as it involved feasting, dancing and sex with demons; all that was lacking was homage to the devil. Gatherings of witches are extremely rare in English witch-trials and folklore about witches.133 Likewise, the allegation of cannibalism and the claim that the witches wanted to anoint themselves with an ointment made from the bodies of the dead is unusual in an English context, while the apparently angelic intervention that saved Grace from suicide suggests a Catholic influence. Robert Poole and Deborah Lea have suggested that the Pendle trial owed a great deal to King James’s Daemonologie (1597), in which the King put forward a Scottish view of witchcraft influenced by French models.134 However, whilst James’s influence may explain why the court 131

    133   134   132

Lea (2011), p. 112. Kittredge (1956), p. 300. Hutton (1999), pp. 98–100. Poole (2002), p. 34; Lea (2011), p. 119.

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was initially prepared to credit Grace’s testimony, it does not explain where her testimony came from in the first place. If Grace was not trained in her testimony by the priest Southworth, it is possible that she and other Lancashire Catholics and crypto-Catholics were somehow absorbing Continental witchcraft beliefs from the missionary priests in their midst. Belief in witchcraft was undoubtedly strong in the area and, like it or not, it was a pastoral issue for priests who would have fallen back either on their own personal beliefs or on demonological ideas derived primarily from French sources. In 1613, the same year in which Thomas Potts published his account of the Lancashire trials, an English translation of a sensational account of eighteen witches convicted at Avignon in 1582 appeared as an appendix to The Admirable History of the Possession and Conversion of a Penitent Woman (1613), an account of the trial of the magician-priest Louis Gaufridy in 1611. Both works were originally authored by the Dominican Inquisitor Sebastian Michaelis. The account of the Avignon witches featured the whole panoply of Continental diabolism, including devil-worship, the Sabbath, cannibalism of infants, copulation with incubi and succubi and the osculum obscenum in which witches pledged their allegiance to the devil by kissing a black goat on the anus. This Catholic work was sufficiently sensational to find a ready market in England, but it is noteworthy that the translator,‘W. B.’, made no attempt to comment on or ‘reform’ Michaelis’s overtly Catholic text. For instance, he retained Michaelis’s defence of the sacrament of confirmation,135 in addition to numerous references to Catholic authors. If ‘W. B.’ was a Catholic or a Catholic sympathizer, the publication of Michaelis’s Pneumalogia in 1613 might have constituted a riposte to Potts – the presentation of evidence that witchcraft of the kind described by Grace Sowerbutts really did exist. In the absence of evidence for W. B.’s identity this must remain speculation. Somewhat less speculative is the possibility that Christopher Southworth knew the Latin version of the Pneumalogia (Paris, 1594). If he did, and spoke of it in the hearing of Grace Sowerbutts, this would account for the resemblance between her testimony and some of the lurid accusations in Michaelis’s work. This is not necessarily damning evidence that Southworth deliberately instructed Grace to accuse the three women. However, the most plausible explanation for the apparently ‘foreign’ elements in the Samlesbury witch trial is the intervention of a missionary priest. Potts’s rhetoric turned Southworth’s supposed accusation against the women against him. Because he had plotted to incriminate the innocent, 135   Michaelis, S. (trans. ‘W.B.’), The Admirable History of the Possession and Conversion of a Penitent Woman (London, 1613), p. 303.

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he, and not the ‘witches’ who murdered the infant in Grace’s fantasy, was ‘a bloudy Butcher’. Likewise Southworth, not his innocent victims, had acted ‘by the helpe of the Devill’. Commenting on the case twelve years later, John Gee noted that ‘such a malicious and bloudy proiect of subornation, must bee a master-trick of some sublimed spirit, fit to instruct a novice Assassine, and to read a Lecture in the Iesuites dark chamber of meditation.’136 These were not, of course, genuine accusations that Southworth was himself a witch; rather, Potts pointed out the irony that it was the Jesuits and seminary priests who were really in league with the devil through their machinations and conspiracies. Exactly what Southworth intended to achieve by incriminating these women, other than punishing them for going to church, is unclear. The fact that the charge against Southworth could only be extracted from Grace after she had been in the house of a Protestant minister for four months receiving ‘instruction’ counts against genuineness of the priest’s involvement, and it was in the interests of the three women to incriminate Southworth in order to save themselves. However, the Samlesbury case demonstrates that the belief that priests faked possessions was even more powerful than belief in the reality of witchcraft and the devil. Once the judge suspected that a priest was involved, the question of the reality of the witchcraft and possession disappeared; it went without saying that it was all imposture. Witchcraft and the Catholic Mission Evidence suggests that belief in witches was as much prevalent among ordinary English Catholics as it was among Protestants in the seventeenth century. Witchcraft and bewitchment were everyday realities with which missionary priests were obliged to engage in one way or another. John Rudgley, the son of a Protestant father and a Catholic mother who arrived at the English College in Rome in October 1607, vividly described his fear of witches:137 My teacher Master Southcott taught me to make the sign of the cross, which, although I did not understand its meaning at all, nor did I know the reason why I did it, I observed as diligently as I was able, especially when I went to sleep; and when on a journey I noticed women proceeding in the opposite direction, I judged them (if they were old) to be sorceresses (veneficas) and enchantresses

136

  Gee (1624), p. 53.   Kenny, A. (ed.), The Responsa Scholarum of the English College, Rome:

137

Part I, 1598–1621 (London: CRS, 1962), p. 195.

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(incantatrices) (because many pests of this sort are prowling in those parts), who often used to cast me into much fear.

Keith Thomas argued that ‘belief in the protective power of religion’ against witchcraft distinguished Catholics from Protestants, who stressed that divine providence might allow the bewitchment of a godly person.138 Whether or not all of those who believed in the protective power of piety were crypto-Catholics (and this is not as obvious as Thomas implied), Catholics certainly held this belief and were encouraged to do so by the clergy. Rudgley’s belief in the efficacy of the sign of the cross against witchcraft was endorsed by John Martiall, who insisted that it was ‘medicinable ageinst al coniuration, inchauntement, so[r]cery, and wi[t] chcraft’.139 Martiall reminded his readers that, in the Malleus Maleficarum, they would find that devil-worshippers were required to tread on the cross and images of the Virgin Mary,140 and he recounted a story from Epiphanius concerning a woman who was preserved from love magic by the sign of the cross.141 In his second treatise on the cross, however, Martiall was careful to make clear that ‘faith be able to resiste the force of incantation without the crosse’, but insisted that in this case God allowed the sign of the cross to be effective against witchcraft.142 Thomas Stapleton spoke confidently of ‘the victory of Christians concerning demons’.143 Whereas the failure of the Protestant faith to deal with witchcraft except by judicial means undermined its credit in the eyes of many, Catholic belief in witchcraft was sustained partly by the same factors that made priestly exorcisms so popular. Catholics had cornered the market when it came to unbewitching by religious rather than magical means. The convent annals at Lierre recorded how Margaret Mostyn was the victim of an act of bewitchment by love magic at Shrewsbury in 1640, when the Earl of Dumfries ‘by his man’s help procured her to be bewitched, so that she might be forced to fall in love with him, with the proviso that the witchcraft should be sure to do her face no harm’. The Earl bewitched Margaret through her food as well as by a lock of hair, a ribbon, peaches and a letter. ‘An old Catholic servant’ recognized the signs of bewitchment and advised Margaret to throw the love-tokens into the moat. Two years 138   Thomas (1991), p. 592. John Walsh claimed that ‘who so doth once a day saye the Lordes prayer and his Creede in perfite charitie, the Witch shall have no power on hys body or goodes for that day’ (Examination of John Walsh (1566); Ewen (1933), p. 147). 139   Martiall (1565), p. 108r. 140   Ibid., pp. 104v–104r. 141   Ibid., p. 111r. 142   Ibid., p. 191r. 143   Stapleton (1620), vol. 2, p. 503.

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later, Margaret was bewitched again by love magic, along with her sister Elizabeth, this time by her cousin Roger Mostyn who wanted to marry Elizabeth but was opposed by Margaret. The cousin bewitched both women so that he would gain the love of Elizabeth and ‘slight’ Margaret. This time the witchcraft did not have the desired effect on Margaret, who suffered ‘vomits & extraordinary weaknesses’ that appeared only after her profession as a Carmelite nun.144 However, Margaret Mostyn’s interpretation of her afflictions as bewitchment was retrospective. Her confessor, Edmund Bedingfield, noted that ‘she now sees clearly’ that ‘her misery began with extrinsical [causes].’145 It may be that the diabolization of otherwise innocent love-tokens from the past allowed Margaret Mostyn to make sense of her current troubles with reference to events that took place outside the convent walls, rather than acknowledging that the devil might be at work in the community itself. Shortly after the first exorcism of the Mostyn sisters, another nun discovered ‘a great heap … of braided stuff, rather like burnt ribbon and hair’ under the board in the room in which the exorcism had taken place, which was perhaps intended to represent the love-tokens.146 A similar concern to externalize witchcraft is evident in the statement of the devil Maltas (exorcised from Margaret in 1651) that a devil had haunted the monastery for fifty-three years ‘confined here by an old witch who then frequented the house’.147 This was long before the foundation of the Carmelite convent. The boundary between exorcism and unbewitching was blurred for many of the laity as well as the Carmelites of Lierre, as the famous case of the ‘Boy of Bilson’ shows clearly. In 1622, the Protestant controversialist Richard Baddely reprinted an account of the exorcism of the 13-yearold William Perry originally published by a group of Catholic priests in Staffordshire in July 1620, signed ‘H. W.’, and passed by a certain Mr Wheeler to a recusant in the village of Bilston in Staffordshire, Thomas Nechils. The pamphlet later came to light when the case was brought before the Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield. Baddely provided a stepby-step demolition of Wheeler’s pamphlet based on Perry’s subsequent testimony before the Bishop, but not before faithfully reproducing the Catholic side of the story.148 144

Hallett (2007b), pp. 53–4. Ibid., p. 58. Ibid., p. 68. Ibid., p. 83. ‘H.W.’, ‘A Faithful Relation of the Proceedings of the Catholicke Gentlemen with the Boy of Bilson’, in Baddely, R., The Boy of Bilson: or, a True Discovery of the Late Notorious Impostures of Certaine Romish Priests in their pretended Exorcisme … of a young Boy, named William Perry (London, 1622), pp. 45–54.     146   147   148   145

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According to ‘H. W.’, the possession started after Perry’s encounter with an old woman named Joan Cocke (an incident reminiscent of the fears of the young John Rudgley):149 The Boy returning homeward, from Schoole, to Bilson in Staffordshire where hee dwelt, an old woman, unknowne, met him, and taxed him in that he did not give her good time of the day, saying that he was a foule thing, and that it had been better for him if he had saluted her. At which words the Boy felt a thing to pricke him to the very heart.

Subsequently, Perry suffered fits and showed the classic symptoms of demonic possession, vomiting unnatural objects from his body like pins and feathers. Perry’s parents seem to have brought in local cunning-folk before seeking the help of missionary priests, since when he arrived the exorcist demanded that the ‘Sorceries of Witches’ that had been applied to the boy’s body should be burnt before he proceeded.150 The priests described the objects vomited by the boy as ‘maleficialia’ or ‘sorceries’, which they burnt. When the boy seemed to improve somewhat, the exorcist instructed him to pray for the witch, ‘and for her conversion from that wicked life’.151 However, the priests do not seem to have gained a monopoly on exorcism in the Perry household, and the lead exorcist was eventually obliged to come to a pragmatic recognition that Perry’s father would bring in ‘witches’ (that is, cunning-folk) again, on the proviso that they could not make use of the blessed water and oil that the priests had left with him, since ‘I would not mingle God and the divell together.’152 William Perry was not all he seemed, and eventually confessed to the Bishop’s Court that he had faked possession in order to avoid going to school.153 Whatever the outcome and the subsequent glee of Protestant controversialists, however, the Catholic account reveals that belief in witchcraft was very much alive amongst missionary clergy and, indeed, a critical component in the campaign of exorcism and healings. It remained so after the Civil War. A Catholic pamphlet of 1663 claimed that during a period of five weeks a priest named Blake conducted a campaign of miraculous healings in London that included ‘Edmond Swine Souldier, living in Eagle-Court over against Somerset-House in the Strand, in Mr. Crossbye’s a Shoomakers House, being by Witchcraft impotent to know his 149   Baddely (1622), p. 46. The encounter with a ‘sinister stranger’ was a staple of possession narratives (Oldridge (2010), p. 142). 150   Ibid., p. 47. 151   Ibid., pp. 49–50. 152   Ibid., p. 53. 153   Ewen (1933), p. 237.

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new married Wife’. At the same time ‘Mrs. Anne Prince, living at the Hen and Chickens in Middle-Rowe at Holborn, being just a year troubled with Witchcraft and Devils, was perfectly cured and dispossessed of both.’154 The widespread Continental idea that witches caused sexual impotence was rare in England,155 and its appearance in this missionary pamphlet is another indication that Catholic priests brought certain Continental beliefs about witchcraft with them. The Jesuit Annual Letter of 1651 reported that the ‘Water of St Ignatius’ was frequently used ‘in the case of possessed persons and witches’,156 and the Annual Letter for 1655 recorded that ‘The devils cry out from the bodies of those possessed that they are tormented by the water, and that the charms are broken, and that it alone, without any other exorcism, suffices to expel them.’157 These words suggest that it was accepted, without question, that ‘charms’ (that is, bewitchment) and possession were directly linked in the minds of ordinary Catholics. There is no evidence to suggest that this belief was ever discouraged by priests in the seventeenth century. A London woman dispossessed by the use of holy water given to her by her Catholic neighbours in 1635 was reportedly afflicted by witchcraft, and in the same village a blacksmith’s family were freed from bewitchment by wearing the Agnus Dei.158 During the Jesuit mission to Westmoreland in 1638–39, a Protestant woman who thought herself afflicted by witchcraft applied for relief to her own ministers, without effect; she then approached a Jesuit who heard her confession and then exorcized her. The woman’s relapse into religious conformity was seen as the cause of her renewed molestation by the devil: ‘Thinking herself now safe the inconstant woman returned to her former heresy but soon relapsed into a state of hopeless bodily disease.’159 The Jesuit theologian Peter Thyraeus, echoing Thomas Stapleton, explained that heretics were particularly vulnerable to demonic possession.160 In one sense, they were already in the power of the devil, and without the Catholic faith they were destitute of protection against 154

  ‘A.S.’, Miracles not ceas’d (1663), p. 23. On Blake, see Walsham (2003),

p. 810. 155

Thomas (1991), p. 519. Foley, vol. 2, p. 6. Ibid., p. 20. Foley, vol. 7:2, p. 1133. The Agnus Dei was also effective in freeing a Lancashire man from possession in 1594 (De Yepes, D., Historia Particular de la Persecucion de Inglaterra (Madrid, 1599), vol. 1, p. 104). 159   Foley, vol. 3, p. 123. 160   Thyraeus, P., ‘Benedictio domus novae aut daemonibus infestae’, in Daemoniaci cum Locis Infestis et Terriculamentis Nocturnis (Cologne, 1604), pp. 55–8.     157   158   156

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the powers of darkness. The Annual Letter of 1622 recorded that in order to relieve a boy suffering from spells inflicted by a local wizard, a Jesuit signed a cross on his forehead and read the Gospel of St John over him; afterwards he fastened an Agnus Dei in his clothes. When this was removed by a Protestant minister, the boy was possessed again.161 As late as January 1696, Thomas Ashton of Tunstead near Wigan was exorcized by Jesuits after bewitchment by a wizard.162 The surviving evidence can leave us in no doubt that the Jesuits, at least, endorsed the witchcraft beliefs prevalent in local communities and exploited their missionary potential with little thought of the dangers of engendering superstition among the laity. Characteristic features of English witchcraft beliefs that appear in the Jesuit accounts include the manifestation of the devil in the form of animal familiars, a belief not shared on the Continent and one that missionary seminarians would not have encountered in Catholic demonological works.163 On one occasion, spirits previously exorcized from a girl on the Feast of St Ignatius approached the son of a labourer (who had, significantly, conformed to the Church of England) in the form of three black dogs; they commanded him to kneel to them and receive their blessing, but after exorcism the boy too was freed.164 What evidence we have of Catholic witchcraft belief in the seventeenth century, in so far as it can be distinguished at all from non-Catholic belief, suggests that it was a mixture of pre-existing folk-beliefs with ideas brought from the Continent by missionary priests. However, the differences between Catholic and Protestant witch-beliefs are not so strongly marked that it would have been possible to recognize a Catholic from the Protestant by his or her attitude to witchcraft, and the beliefs of ordinary Catholics were primarily the product of the ‘popular religion’ in which they and other English people were participants. The relatively small number of Catholic missionary priests and the furtive nature of their mission rendered their influence on deeply held fears concerning witches and the devil transitory, and the uniqueness of the Samlesbury case goes some way towards proving this point. Grace Sowerbutts articulated a marginal view of witchcraft influenced by Continental ideas that, as a consequence of her recantation, may have been denied the opportunity of influencing Catholics more widely.

161

    163   164   162

Foley, vol. 7:2, p. 1098. Taylor, Z., The Devil Turn’d Casuist (London, 1696), p. 2. Gaskill (2005), p. 4 Foley, vol. 2, p. 21.

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Catholics, Magic and Astrology The association between Catholicism and ceremonial magic or conjuration, as opposed to witchcraft, was a powerful one in English popular culture. Again, it derived primarily from Reginald Scot. Scot diligently compared Catholic rites with spells from grimoires, with the ironic consequence that the Discoverie of Witchcraft was subsequently used as a grimoire.165 Whilst magic and witchcraft were condemned together by both Protestant and Catholic theologians, they were distinct in two important ways. The use of magic for purposes such as discovering buried treasure or retrieving lost goods did not harm others and was not, therefore, witchcraft, the most serious offence under the 1604 act. Furthermore, although ceremonial magic occasionally had a satanic flavour, often it involved the invocation of fairies or angels rather than demons. At worst, this was unwitting or indirect invocation of the devil. Magic also demanded knowledge of grimoires, the Latin language and mathematics for astrological calculations; it was a skill with a human element rather than a straightforward pact with the devil. Although economic desperation seems to have driven more and more people into attempting magical rites to find buried treasure in the sixteenth century,166 the prevalent belief that learned languages should be used to talk to spirits meant that conjuration remained largely an elite activity. Catholic priests, according to Protestant polemic, were addicted to magic. The case of the conjurer-priests in 1561, whether or not it inspired the 1563 Witchcraft Act, confirmed suspicions concerning the Catholic clergy that were grounded in an older Reformation polemic against the mediaeval church.167 According to John Bale, magicians required the mass to work their spells, and no priest was considered learned unless he was also a conjurer.168 In 1566, John Walsh claimed that in the seven years he had been employed by ‘a certayne Priest’ named Robert Draiton he had learnt ‘phisicke and surgery’, but also dealt with the fairies. A book previously belonging to Draiton ‘had great circles in it wherein he would set two waxe candels a crosse of virgin waxe, to raise the familiar spirite’.169 Richard Bernard, in his Guide to Grand-Jury Men (1627), stated that ‘sorcery is the practice of that whore, the Romish synagogue’,170 and 165

  Davies, O., Grimoires: A History of Magic Books (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 70. 166   Ibid., pp. 93–6. 167   Parish (2005), p. 8. 168   Cameron (2010), p. 210. 169   The Examination of John Walsh … upon certayne Interrogatories touchyng Wytchcrafte and Sorcerye (London, 1566). See also Ewen (1933), p. 146. 170   Bernard, R., A Guide to Grand-Jury Men (London, 1627), p. 99.

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Harsnett claimed that Weston and his colleagues chose to perform their exorcisms at Denham and Fulmer in 1586 because there was supposed to be treasure buried there which they intended to find by magic.171 Gee accused the priest Christopher Wainman of pretending to be able to generate the Philosophers’ Stone, but this was not so much an accusation of magic as fraud; Wainman was nothing more than a ‘common mountebank’.172 Alchemy was regarded as a respectable science in itself and Gee called Wainman’s motives into question. At his murder trial in 1652, Giles Fenderlin confessed that when he was a soldier in the Low Countries in 1638, he paid a Jesuit 45 shillings for a written pact with the devil that protected him and his companions from swords and bullets. The pact was effective for five years, after which Giles returned to the priest; this time, for the price of £3 17s, the Jesuit made him sign a covenant with the devil in his own blood (in Latin, of course) and gave him a ‘Ring of Inchantment’ that would allow him to discover treasure and be conveyed ‘40 or 50 miles’ in an instant. Thereafter Giles was plagued by an evil spirit that appeared to him in the form of a lawyer, urging him to commit suicide, and then later ‘in the perfect shape of a Bishop, white lawn sleeves on both armes’.173 Oldridge has argued that the Jesuit in Fenderlin’s narrative, like the ubiquitous demonic friars in early modern drama and popular literature, played only an incidental role, indicating that ‘the satanic nature of Catholicism was sufficiently well-known to be taken for granted.’174 This may be true, but another possible reason why accusations of conjuration against Catholic priests did not take centre stage in controversial literature was that there was insufficient evidence of specific cases. If Catholic clergy had been engaged in conjuration, it would have been a matter of considerable concern to their superiors and we could expect some evidence of this to survive, but in fact there is nothing of the kind. The missionary clergy in England may well have been sufficiently educated in Counter-Reformation theology to avoid the temptation of ritual magic; even their enemies did not imagine that seminary priests used the mass to practise love magic. The same could not be said of the Catholic laity, however, some of whom unwittingly or consciously ignored the church’s teachings. The best-known cunning-woman from a Catholic background was Mary Parish (1630–1703), born Mary Tomson at Turville in Buckinghamshire. Mary was immortalized in the diaries of the Whig 171   Harsnett, S., A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (London, 1603), p. 14. 172   Gee (1624), p. 22. 173   The Tryall and Examination of Mrs. Joan Peterson (London, 1652), pp. 3–5. 174   Oldridge (2010), p. 110.

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politician Goodwin Wharton, whose mistress and spiritual consultant she was from 1683 until her death.175 Unfortunately, our only source for Mary’s career is Wharton’s diary itself, which reported what she told him. The fact that Wharton was prone to fantasies and Mary was not averse to self-promotion renders the diary a problematic source. Mary claimed that her mother was a Catholic and her father a Protestant, but that she was brought up in the Catholic faith by her mother, whose maiden name was Cox. J. Kent Clark was unable to find any reference to Tomsons in Turville’s parish registers, but the marriage of Mary Cox (Mary’s maternal grandmother) to Richard West really did take place in April 1605.176 An Elizabeth West of Turville was listed as a recusant in the reign of Charles II, lending some credence to Mary’s claim that the family was Catholic.177 Mary Parish claimed to possess magical powers conferred on her by her ‘spirit advisor’, the ghost of a highwayman named George Whitmore whom she got to know whilst in prison for debt. Mary made an agreement with Whitmore that he would return and help her after death. Mary derived this idea from a similar arrangement her uncle, John Tomson, had with the ghost of a Spanish lady who had been his mistress in life.178 In spite of her powers, Mary was abused and exploited and passed through a series of misfortunes before she encountered Wharton. Mary, who had first met the fairies in a charcoal pit when she was six or seven years old, helped Wharton to make contact with the ‘Kingdom of the Lowlanders’ beneath Hounslow Heath. Wharton subsequently believed that he had an affair with Penelope, the Queen of the Fairies. Interwoven with this bizarre fantasy, Mary Parish underwent a rather more prosaic spiritual crisis in April 1684. She attended mass at the Spanish ambassador’s residence, Wild House, but could not bring herself to confess to the priest there as she personally disliked him. Consequently, she had not been to confession for a long time and was excluded from the sacrament. When she eventually brought herself to confess, the priest instructed her, as a penance, to walk to Tyburn and back, without stopping for food and water, on three consecutive days. The weather was so hot that Wharton feared for her health and tried to dissuade her from carrying out the penance; on her second trip to Tyburn, she reported that she met a stranger who called himself her father and declared that she should ‘be no more subject to the priest’. Being a spirit medium, Mary was able to consult the angels with whom she regularly conversed in a 175   On the life of Mary Parish, see Kent Clark, J., Goodwin Wharton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 17–32. 176   Ibid., p. 332. 177   Miscellanea V (CRS: London, 1909), p. 80. 178   Kent Clark (1984), p. 25.

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glass, and the Archangel Gabriel appeared with ‘orders from the Lord’. Gabriel commanded Mary to tell the priest at Wild House that he had ‘dealt wickedly by her’ and that ‘she would renounce his church forever.’ Mary subsequently attended a service at St Paul’s, Covent Garden, where an angel assured her that all religions were equally good, but Catholicism was not suitable for her since she did not understand it. According to Wharton, Mary remained a Protestant for the rest of her life.179 Given Wharton’s own anti-Catholicism, it seems unlikely that Mary’s conversion was designed to ingratiate her with her patron. The angels did not condemn Catholicism, just the priest she disliked. Their religious teaching was pluralistic, like the doctrine of the angels who explained that it was acceptable for John Dee to receive communion in a Catholic church in Bohemia in 1584.180 For the likes of Mary Parish and Edward Kelly, Dee’s medium, religious controversy mattered less than the eccentric spiritual world they inhabited. It is unclear whether Mary confessed her magical activities to the priest at Wild House and whether she received the penance partly for them. However, since Mary took pains to associate herself with benevolent spiritual entities such as fairies, angels and the friendly spirits of the dead, it is unlikely that she considered her activities sinful, in spite of their flagrant incompatibility with Counter-Reformation Catholicism. Mary Parish was one of a kind, a remarkable character in her own time, and consequently it is dangerous to infer too much regarding the attitude of lay Catholics towards magic from her example. What is clear, however, is that the authority of heavenly messengers outweighed that of the visible church for the Catholic Mary Parish, just as it did for the Protestant John Dee a century earlier. Like the fairy kingdom described by Robert Herrick in his poem The Fairy Temple,181 Mary’s ‘Kingdom of the Lowlanders’ mimicked the Catholic church, having its own Pope and elaborate religious ceremonies. One of the most important characters in the Kingdom was ‘Father Friar’, the oldest and wisest fairy who was advisor to the King.182 Even after her conversion to Protestantism, Father Friar remained a sympathetic figure in Mary’s microcosmology, providing one Catholic counterpart to the antiCatholic representations of demonic friars that appeared in dramas and chapbooks throughout the seventeenth century.183 179 180

  Ibid., pp. 81–2.   Harkness, D., John Dee’s Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy,

and the End of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 153. 181   Herrick, R., Hesperides (London, 1648), pp. 101–5. Although Buccola (2006), pp. 55–7, has argued that Herrick’s poem was anti-Catholic, it is best described as playful and may even have inspired Mary Parish. 182   Kent Clark (1984), p. 30. 183   Oldridge (2010), p. 110.

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Other practitioners of magic and astrology proved more contrite when confronted with the wickedness of their deeds by the Catholic clergy. One day in a London street some time in the 1670s, a handbill was pushed into the hand of a Carmelite friar, Bede Travers, advertising that ‘Madame X., living in such and such a street, in consequence of her deep researches and long experience, was enabled to predict future events.’ Travers visited Madame X and informed her that ‘all the angels in heaven and all the devils in hell are unable to know the Future. God alone knows it, and therefore it is untrue that you are able to discover it by calculation.’184 The woman admitted her fraud but, in Travers’ view, ‘She was not so fortunate as another person of the same profession I received into the Church, and who, abandoning her deceitful practices, underwent great infirmity and poverty with admirable patience, giving thereby clear signs of salvation.’ Travers’ blanket condemnation of ‘calculation’ (that is, astrology) was by no means uncontroversial, and in the early part of the seventeenth century, interest in astrological prognostications was prevalent amongst Catholics and Protestants alike. Likewise, learned Catholics and Protestants shared an interest in magic. Dr John Caius, who refounded his Cambridge college in Mary’s reign, owned a manuscript, ‘Kay of Knowledge’ (a version of the Clavicula Salomonis),185 and the crypto-Catholic mathematician and alchemist Thomas Allen of Gloucester Hall, Oxford may also have been interested in conjuration. Allen collaborated in alchemical projects with Henry Percy, the ‘Wizard Earl’ of Northumberland and others at the Earl’s Isleworth residence, Syon House,186 and his reputation as a conjurer was actively promoted by his servant John Thuragh. Allen was consulted about laying ghosts and his reputation for conjuration was such that, on a visit to Sir John Scudamore in Herefordshire in 1620, some maids tried to throw his watch into the moat because they believed it contained a devil.187 There were several connections between Thomas Allen and John Dee. Allen acquired at least twelve of Dee’s manuscripts after his death in 1609, and it is possible that he employed Dee’s medium Edward Kelly before Kelly entered Dee’s service. Furthermore, in 1583 Allen was approached by the Polish alchemist Count Albert Laski (1527–1605) to accompany him back to Poland, an 184   Zimmerman, B., Carmel in England: A History of the English Mission of the Discalced Carmelites, 1615 to 1849 (London: Burns and Oates, 1899), pp. 259–60. 185   Halliwell, J.O. (ed.), The Life of St. Katharine … and an Account of a Magical Manuscript of Dr. Caius (Brixton Hill, 1848). 186   Watson, A.G., ‘Thomas Allen of Oxford and his Manuscripts’, in Parkes, M.B. and Watson, A.G. (eds), Medieval Scribes, Manuscripts and Libraries: Essays presented to N. R. Ker (London: Scolar Press, 1978), pp. 279–316, at p. 280; Harkness (1999), p. 120. 187   Oldridge (2010), p. 79.

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invitation that was taken up by Dee and Kelly.188 Allen bequeathed most of his manuscripts to his pupil Kenelm Digby.189 Through Digby, Allen’s occult interests survived, albeit transmuted into a rationalistic form. The astrological interests of another Catholic or crypto-Catholic astrologer, John Gadbury, took a similarly rationalistic turn in the years following the Restoration. Gadbury, who began life as a political radical and a disciple of William Lilly, adopted a ‘loyalist’ approach to astrology after 1660, to the extent that he even denied the efficacy of his own discipline: ‘I deliver my Predictions, not as Oracles, but as Conjectures: Neither do I own Astrology farther than the Learned Doctors and Fathers of the Church, and General Councils have allowed thereof.’190 For Gadbury, loyalty to church and king was a prerequisite of astrological study. Gadbury’s disclaimer was fortuitous, given that he predicted a great defeat for the Turks in November 1688 and failed to foresee the overthrow of James II. Gadbury set himself against the ‘magical’ astrology of Nicholas Culpepper, John Booker and his own master Lilly, and attempted a rapprochement with the Royal Society.191 Although he was ultimately unsuccessful in making astrology respectable among natural scientists in the early eighteenth century, Gadbury’s Catholic sympathies and his adherence to the church’s ambivalent attitude towards astrology may have ensured that his almanacs did not suffer the fate of those that claimed to predict the future with perfect accuracy. Catholics do not seem to have been any more involved in occult pursuits than any other section of English society. Those with such interests were a headache for the missionary clergy. However, the missionary clergy themselves were conspicuously untainted by the suspicions of sorcery that had sometimes been attached to their predecessors among the Marian clergy. Recusant piety did not lend itself to the experimentation with magic that occasionally sprang up amongst the complacent mediaeval clergy and the rural parsons who succeeded them. Whilst they may have shunned illicit magic, however, the Catholic clergy were invariably prepared to make use of the official ‘magic’ of the church – such as exorcism and blessings – and the laity may not always have had a secure understanding of the distinction.

188

    190   191   189

Harkness (1999), p. 20. Watson (1978), p. 279. Gadbury, J., Ephemeris … 1688 (London, 1688). Curry, P., ‘Gadbury, John’ in DNB, vol. 21, pp. 239–42.

CHAPTER 5

Catholics and Witchcraft in the Age of Enlightenment In the last two decades, the once-established view that belief in witchcraft virtually disappeared in England with the cessation of witchcraft trials in the eighteenth century has been comprehensively challenged by a number of historians including Ian Bostridge, Owen Davies, Brian Levack and Roy Porter.1 The survival of popular belief after the disappearance of witches from the courts (from 1717) and then the statute books (from 1736) is now accepted. Scepticism concerning witches remained an elite phenomenon for much of the century, and some religious denominations mounted a defence of the reality of witchcraft. However, as Porter has argued, the eventual fate of belief in witchcraft was determined not by pamphlet controversies but by a gradual shift in sensibility amongst the gentry that eventually filtered down to ordinary people.2 Enlightenment rationalism deprived witchcraft of a space in which to exist. In his influential Essay Concerning Witchcraft (1718), the Whig clergyman Francis Hutchinson propagated a new and influential historical myth, attributing the laws against witchcraft to ‘the Influence of Popery and Ignorance’. Hutchinson carefully recorded Papal condemnations of witchcraft, giving the impression that witchcraft was a Catholic obsession.3 However, it was a Catholic, Alexander Pope, who perhaps did more than anyone to popularize the de-personification and reinterpretation of evil as ‘universal Good’.4 The word ‘popish’ was applied indiscriminately to all superstition well before 1700, and Bostridge and Porter have demonstrated that belief in witchcraft was 1

  Bostridge (1997); Davies (1999); Levack, B., ‘The Decline and End of Witchcraft Prosecutions’, in Gijswit-Hofstra, M. and Porter, R., Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (London: Athlone Press, 1999), pp. 1–94; Porter, R., ‘Witchcraft and Magic in Enlightenment, Romantic and Liberal Thought’ in ibid. pp. 191–254. 2   Porter (1999), p. 202. 3   Hutchinson, F., An Essay Concerning Witchcraft (London, 1718), pp. 250, 51–60. 4   Pope, ‘Essay on Man’, Epistle IV, l. 114 in Poems, p. 539; Porter (1999), pp. 203–4.

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primarily defended in the early eighteenth century by high churchmen keen to maintain the ‘confessional state’.5 In the century’s second half, it was primarily dissenters, Methodists and ‘enthusiasts’ rather than Catholics who were ridiculed for their continued belief in witches. For many people, the evidence for witchcraft was undeniable and included their own experiences and those of their friends, neighbours and relatives.6 However, eighteenth-century witch-belief took the form of a passive acknowledgement that ‘such things may be’ rather than an active determination to identify witches. Davies has argued that even educated individuals who continued to believe in witchcraft thought that it was a thing of the past and of doubtful relevance.7 Cameron has argued that the key intellectual shift that occurred for both Protestants and Catholics was not the rejection of superstition; rather, intellectuals ceased to fear supernatural forces even if they did not deny their existence.8 This subtle distinction was especially important amongst Catholic commentators, who tended to relegate demonology to the margins rather than attack it openly. Bostridge’s analysis of the decline of witchcraft belief focused on the political role of witchcraft narratives in reinforcing ‘certain notions of the relationship between the secular and spiritual realms’.9 Sceptics such as Hutchinson advanced much the same arguments as Thomas Ady in the seventeenth and Reginald Scot in the sixteenth centuries.10 Indeed, writers against witchcraft frequently vented their frustration that the same arguments, advanced decade after decade, were failing to eradicate belief in witches. If continuing belief was partly a political phenomenon, then this goes some way towards explaining the painfully slow effects of rationalist polemic. Just as a strand of scepticism always existed amongst Protestant scholars, so Catholics were similarly divided between cautious sceptics such as Bede Travers and Jesuits who enthusiastically embraced popular beliefs to further their cause. However, with a few exceptions (the Blackloists), Catholic ‘sceptics’ were less strident than their Protestant counterparts, preferring to remain within the pale of orthodoxy concerning the power of the devil. Peter Elmer has argued that elites, despite their learning, were not necessarily more likely to be sceptical of witchcraft.11 This is especially 5 6

  Bostridge (1997), pp. 163–5; Porter (1999), pp. 207–8.   Bennett, G., ‘Ghost and Witch in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century’,

Folklore 97 (1986), pp. 3–14, at p. 6. 7   Davies (1999), pp. 8, 11. 8   Cameron (2010), p. 311. 9   Bostridge (1997), p. 4. 10   Ibid., p. 3. 11   Elmer (2001), p. 105.

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true of English Catholics. It would be surprising if learned Catholic clergy and laity in England had abandoned belief in witchcraft before their Protestant counterparts. The English College at Douai, the nursery of the secular clergy and many of their patrons, was noted for its conservative curriculum.12 Douai did not adopt Cartesian and Newtonian ideas until the 1750s at the earliest.13 Few English people, Catholic or Protestant, were excessively preoccupied with witches after 1700, and the vast proportion of literature that mentioned witchcraft rejected its reality. The repeal of the 1604 Witchcraft Act in 1736 made it less likely that people would look for the cause of maleficium. Eighteenth-century bewitchments were often anonymous, and even those who accepted the reality of witchcraft had little interest in punishing witches. However, ‘bewitchment’ continued to serve as a more comprehensible description of possession, since it took account of the widespread popular belief that a human intermediary was needed for the devil to harm the innocent. Clergy ‘saw the witch merely as an instrument of the Devil, and thus directed their attentions more towards Satan than his earthly vassals’.14 Bewitchment was a trial sent by God through the devil. Since the ‘mechanical philosophy’ arose first in the universities of Oxford and Cambridge where the clergy of the established church were educated, it is no surprise that scepticism was rife within the ecclesiastical establishment. Although some Nonconformists were deeply sceptical as well, dissident Protestants of all persuasions were usually characterized by their refusal to abandon belief in a spiritual world permeating everyday life.15 Some high church Non-Jurors who broke from the Church of England in the late seventeenth century, originally over their refusal to swear allegiance to William of Orange, also endorsed exorcism. Their interest was as much a consequence of their enthusiasm for the liturgies of the early church as their contempt for the Hanoverian church. The Manchester Non-Juror Thomas Deacon (1697–1753) regarded exorcism as one of the ‘twelve sacraments’, and included a rite of exorcism in his Compleat Collection of Devotions (1734), which Charles Wesley used

12

  In 1633, Matthew Kellison was able to declare that the College had never taught Copernican cosmology, and George Leyburn held out against Blackloism (Southgate (1993), pp. 26, 39). 13   Sharratt, M., ‘Natural Philosophy at Douai, Crook Hall and Ushaw’, in Phillips (2004), pp. 9–22, at p. 15. 14   Davies (1999), p. 27. 15   See, for instance, Daniel Defoe’s The Secrets of the Invisible World Disclosed (London, 1729), published under the pseudonym of Andrew Moreton. On nonconformist attitudes to witchcraft, see also Davies (1999), pp. 11–13; Porter (1999), pp. 238–9.

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on a possessed girl in 1736.16 Deacon deployed the Greek term energumens to describe victims of the devil. This avoided resorting to the vocabulary of Scholastic theology (‘possession’) or folk-belief (‘bewitchment’), and reflected the Church Fathers’ lack of interest in witches. However, John Wesley (who contributed to Deacon’s Compleat Collection) was less cautious, famously declaring that those who gave up belief in witchcraft knew in their hearts that they were thereby giving up the Bible. The early Methodists embraced all evidence of the supernatural with enthusiasm since it confirmed the reality of spirits to a sceptical world; whether these phenomena were the work of the devil, the spirits of the dead, witches, or hidden powers of the human soul was of secondary importance.17 Jacobitism and Witchcraft In 1690, James II returned to exile in France having failed to regain his throne through his Irish campaign. An immense concourse of English, Irish and Scottish Jacobites followed him to St Germain-en-Laye and became dependents of his court. Triumphant pamphlets and chapbooks in England made extensive use of stereotyped and anti-Catholic images of witches: ‘The crude witch image had become a political football, exploited by jubilant Whigs to conjure up a hideous but hilarious burlesque of the fiendish Tories and wild Irish.’18 As late as 1751, when Ruth Osborne died by a mob ‘swimming’, it was reported that she spoke words in support of the Young Pretender.19 In the propaganda of the Glorious Revolution, Jacobitism was associated with witchcraft and dark superstition, but Catholic Jacobites also appropriated and exploited images of witchcraft. At first glance it might seem surprising that, less than ten years after the Chambre Ardente carried out a witch-hunt amongst the French aristocracy,20 Jacobite exiles were prepared to make light of the figure of the witch. However, attitudes changed rapidly after 1682 when a royal

16   Deacon, T., ‘Prayers for the Energumens’, in Hall, P., (ed.), Fragmenta Liturgica (Bath: Binns and Goodwin, 1848), vol. 6, pp. 86–8; Broxap, H., A Biography of Thomas Deacon: The Manchester Non-Juror (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1911), p. 180. 17   On Wesley’s attitude to witchcraft and possession, see Knox (1950), pp. 517–20; Bennett (1986), p. 6; Porter (1999), pp. 238–9. 18   Porter (1999), p. 246. 19   Monod (1989), p. 233. 20   For an account of these events, see Mossiker, F., The Affair of the Poisons (London: Gollancz, 1970), pp. 139–56.

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proclamation abolished the laws against witchcraft; thenceforward all cases were treated as insanity at best and sacrilege at worst.21 Witchcraft as a metaphor for heresy in Catholic literature had a long history stretching back to Robert Parsons, and Jacobites recruited it as a metaphor for rebellion as well. As early as 1686, when the Catholic press under James enjoyed a brief period of freedom, the Divine Right theorist Nathaniel Johnson (1627–1705) compared the cry of ‘No Popery!’ to witchcraft: The pretence of maintaining Religion, or the sham-affrights such People divulge they have of it … may … be used as a blind to carry on any Intriegue; and the pretence of refining Religion, hath powerful Philtres and Fascinations, to bewitch the Unwary, and tickle the Hypocrite.22

John Sergeant, standard-bearer of Blackloism, exploited this metaphor to its ultimate extent in an anti-Williamite political allegory, An Historical Romance (1694). Jealous of King Eugenius of Utopia (James), Nasonius (William), the enemy of the giant Gallieno (Louis XIV) summons the witch Crampogna from Lapland. Crampogna picturesquely fulfilled every witch stereotype of the seventeenth century whilst simultaneously ridiculing learned demonology and William’s Dutch homeland as a ‘stinking Fen’:23 Embarking her self in an Egg-Shell, or as some Authors say, in a RottenOrange-Peel, or as others say, getting a stride upon a Broom-staff, she arriv’d in the Hydropick Land in the space of two Hours, and signified to Nasonius in his Dream, That he shou’d meet her the next Evening in a Fog, near the side of a stinking Fen, well known unto him. As soon as he came to the place, he saw the grisly Hag with Hollow Eyes, Dishelveld Hair, Lank Cheeks, and Shrivell’d Chaps.

Crampogna repeats ‘a long ribble-row of Prayers backwards’ and summons Lucifer, who sends out the spirits of rebellion, falsehood, folly and ingratitude to help him depose Eugenius.24 In A Letter from a Trooper in Flanders to his Comrade shewing that Luxemburg is a Witch, and deals 21 22

  Ibid., pp. 223–4; Porter (1999), p. 211.   Johnston, N., The Excellency of Monarchical Government (London,

1686), p. 89. 23   Sergeant, J., An Historical Romance of the Wars between the mighty Giant Gallieno, and the great Knight Nasonius (Dublin, 1694), p. 22. 24   Ibid., pp. 22–6. On the political significance of Sergeant’s Romance, see Rose, C., England in the 1690s: Revolution, Religion and War (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 28–9, 120–21.

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with the Devil (1695), Sergeant went on to satirize England’s questionable military prowess in the war against France through an imaginary letter from a soldier in the field, who insisted that every French victory could be explained only by the diabolical assistance given to the Duke of Luxemburg. This was a thinly disguised attack on English military incompetence. Jacobite exiles drew on similar images. Between 1703 and 1709, Anthony Hamilton (c. 1644–1719), a courtier at St Germain, produced a series of fantastic French contes in mock imitation of the Arabian Nights for the ladies of the court, especially the Duchess of Berwick, Anne Bulkeley. Magical events and characters feature prominently in these ‘fairytales’, which Gillian Avery considered to be romans à clef concealing allusions to court life.25 In Hamilton’s Histoire de Fleur-d’Epine, a gallant named Tarare is dispatched by a Sultan whose daughter, Luyzante, is so beautiful that the radiance of her eyes kills her suitors. A female magician named Serene promises to cure Luyzante if Tarare can restore her daughter, Fleurd’Epine (‘Mayflower’), who is held prisoner by Serene’s sister, the witch Dentüe. Creeping up to her hut, Tarare catches sight of ‘The horrible Dentüe, who whilst muttering several barbarous words, was throwing some herbs and roots into a great cauldron which was on the fire; she stirred all this round, with a tooth which came out of her mouth and which was two ells in length.’26 The grotesquely comical Dentüe is complimented in another story, L’Enchanteur Faustus, by the charming magician Faustus, portrayed as a conjurer at the court of Queen Elizabeth.27 However, not all at St Germain took witchcraft and magic so lightly. The environment of James’s court, at which semi-destitute exiles vied for money and influence, was the perfect one for even the most desperate fantasies to take on a life of their own. At some point in the 1690s, Elizabeth Osmund (Francisca of the Blessed Sacrament, 1674–1720), later a Carmelite nun at Antwerp, was sent to live with her father at St Germain. She was visited by ‘one who call’d herself a Countess’, who ‘made her large promises of honours, riches and pleasures, only desiring her to keep a paper she gave her’. The convent annalist was uncertain whether the Countess made Elizabeth sign the paper, but she told her to conceal it inside her linen trunk. When Elizabeth felt a vocation to the religious life, ‘This forementioned Lady, who was certainly the Divell, diswaded her from this undertaking.’ Even when Elizabeth arrived at the convent, ‘the same Lady appear’d with out the grate, with all her attendance, making signs to intice her out, but 25

  Avery, G., ‘Written for Children: Two Eighteenth-Century English Fairy Tales’, Marvels and Tales 16 (2002), pp. 143–55, at p. 147. 26   Hamilton, A., Histoire de Fleur-d’Epine (Paris, 1730), pp. 48-9. 27   Hamilton, A., ‘L’Enchanteur Faustus: Conte’, in Voyages Imaginaires, Songes, Visions et Romans Cabalistiques (Amsterdam, 1789), vol. 35, pp. 1–32.

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did not speak.’ At her solemn profession on 26 December 1698, ‘she see again the Lady amongest the crowd of people, threathening her with signs of indignation.’ Shortly afterwards Elizabeth began to suffer from ‘strang distempers and fitts’ which continued for two years and only ended when she revealed everything she had experienced to another nun, Catherine Burton, ‘who Allmighty God was pleased to inlighten in these matters’, and gave instructions for her father to burn the linen trunk.28 Catholics and Witchcraft in England Some of the Catholic laity in England, following Sergeant and Hamilton’s lead as well as a burgeoning Enlightenment tradition of mockery of the supernatural, took a jocular approach to witches, if the stories of ‘Meg Shilton’ preserved by the Haydock family are anything to go by. Meg Shilton was supposed to have lived on the Haydock estates in Lancashire in the early years of the eighteenth century. According to one story, a Haydock squire made an agreement with Meg to obtain a hare to hunt, on condition that he would not allow a certain black hound to take part in the chase. When the squire tired of the hunt, he forgot the agreement and released the black hound, which jumped through the window of Meg’s hut and bit her ankle.29 This story belongs to that current of English folklore which acknowledged the reality of witchcraft but portrayed witches as ineffectual and ultimately doomed to suffer as a consequence of their own enchantments. Meg Shilton was no more a threat than stereotyped literary witches like Crampogna and Dentüe. Nevertheless, Catholic theologians continued to assume the reality of witchcraft, even if they did not emphasize it. The Jesuit Levinius Brown (1671–1764), a friend of Pope, drew attention to the Bible’s condemnation of heresy along with idolatry and witchcraft. Demonstrating the inconsistency of the Protestant position from Scripture, Brown invited Protestants to note ‘that heresy is, by the Apostle, numbered among those sins which exclude from the kingdom of heaven, and is put in the same catalogue of crimes with idolatry and witchcraft’.30 In 1715, another Jesuit, William Darrell (1651–1721) invoked witchcraft as political metaphor in his reply to Charles Leslie’s defence of the established church in The Case stated between the Church of Rome and the Church of England 28

  Hallett, N., Lives of Spirit: English Carmelite Self-Writing of the Early Modern Period (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007a), pp. 95–6. 29   Gillow, J., Haydock Papers (London: Burns and Oates, 1888), pp. 40–43. 30   Brown, L., The Protestant’s Trial (in Controverted Points of Faith) by the Written Word (Brussels, 1771), p. 194.

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(1711). Darrell urged Leslie to consider ‘all the Witchcrafts and Idolatries committed in the Church of England these eight and twenty years past’.31 For Darrell, ‘witchcraft’ represented the Church of England’s infidelity to her rightful Supreme Governors since 1688. The extent to which the reality of witchcraft continued to command belief from the Catholic gentry is evidenced by an incident reported by Jane Huddleston of Sawston as late as 1804. In a letter of 7 October that year, she described a case of bewitchment in the Cambridgeshire village to her brother Major Richard Huddlestone. Perhaps expecting to be accused of feminine credulity, Jane took care to preface her comments with a plea for the reasonableness of accepting the veracity of the bewitchment:32 I think it necessary to beg you not to imagine that I have lost my senses and become quite foolish; but really the occurrence is so singular that the most incredulous after due examination won’t allow it to be the best executed trick that ever was, nor could give a better reason for supposing it to be one than that it cannot be anything else.

The ‘occurrence’ involved the mysterious tearing of the clothes of anyone who visited the house of a tanner named Mr Adams. As such, it was an incident that fell into the category of what Davies has called ‘external’ possession, labelled ‘poltergeist’ activity later in the nineteenth century. Possessions of both people and buildings frequently took on a theatrical dimension in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with a steady stream of curious visitors arriving at the scene of the phenomena,33 and the Sawston bewitchment was no different. It seems likely that Jane Huddlestone’s description of the house itself as bewitched, rather than falling back on a ghostly explanation, reflected the views of the villagers, and this story may be taken as an indication of the extent to which Catholic landowners were capable of sharing the supernatural beliefs of their tenants even as late as 1804. However, in the early nineteenth century, the decline of witchcraft belief in urban areas was abated somewhat by the arrival of Irish immigrants convinced of the reality of bewitchment, such as the London shoemaker Michael Kenlish. When on trial for a woman’s attempted murder in 1818, Kenlish claimed that she had bewitched him three years earlier by means of ‘a black cat and a pound of pins’. The woman pointed out that Kenlish’s delusion

31   [Darrell, W.], The Case Review’d, or, An Answer to the Case stated, by Mr. L–y (St Omer, 1715), p. 51. 32   Cambridgeshire Archives, Huddleston Family Manuscripts, 488/C3/HD86. 33   Davies (1999), p. 28.

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arose from the fact that he was very superstitious, and a Catholic.34 The case was dismissed but it can hardly have served to advance the credit of Catholicism with the population at large at a time when Catholics were engaged in intense campaigning for political emancipation. Witchcraft and English Catholics Abroad The extent to which Catholics were a conduit for the dissemination of Continental demonological ideas in seventeenth-century England has already been discussed in Chapter 4. Whether they remained there or returned to England, it was inevitable that English Catholics who spent long periods in the Austrian Netherlands and northern France should have been as much influenced by the attitudes to witchcraft that existed beyond the convent or college walls as they were by opinions prevalent in England. In France, the state’s action against the continuation of witchcraft prosecutions came much earlier than in England. In 1615, 1620, and 1625, the University of Paris condemned the practice of denunciatory exorcism, in which a demoniac was encouraged to identify the person responsible for their bewitchment.35 Although these rulings did not bind clergy outside the jurisdiction of the Parlement of Paris, rulings from the Sorbonne were often a reflection of royal policy and they affected attitudes throughout France, including within English institutions. However, in contrast to England, the climate of scepticism amongst the educated French did not filter down to popular literature, and a taste for religious prodigies and fantastical martyrologies persisted in France right up to the Revolution.36 In other countries such as Portugal, where witch-hunting had never been particularly intense, the Enlightenment permitted the reassertion of an older Catholic approach to witchcraft as mere delusion,37 although the church courts continued to coerce practitioners of popular magic into admitting a link between their practices and the devil.38 John McManners discerned a small minority of clergy in France, among the Jesuits and Dominicans, who were determined to uphold the full panoply of Continental witchcraft mythology in the first three decades of the eighteenth century.39 The majority, however, pursued a middle course, 34   Davies, O., ‘Urbanisation and the Decline of Witchcraft: An Examination of London’, Journal of Social History 30 (1997), pp. 597–617, at p. 600. 35   McManners (1999), p. 222. 36   Cameron (2010), p. 310. 37   Souza (2010), pp. 378–9. 38   Porter (1999), pp. 213–14. 39   McManners (1999), pp. 225–6.

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endorsing traditional pastoral theology and metaphysical demonology but ignoring disputes concerning the nature and existence of spirits. However, they also downplayed the likelihood of spiritual phenomena in the present day.40 This attitude was best exemplified by the Oratorian priest Pierre Lebrun (1661–1729) in his Histoire Critique des Pratiques Superstitieuses (1702). Lebrun’s text was endorsed by numerous doctors of the Sorbonne, suggesting that he was personally orthodox, but in the early eighteenth century the Congregation of the Oratory was strongly associated with Jansenism. Ridicule of ‘superstition’ in eighteenth-century France often carried with it a Gallican political subtext, in much the same way as it would later be identified with Cisalpinism in England. Lebrun advanced a fideistic view of the power of demons as a truth that simply had to be accepted as a matter of faith, and was incapable of integration within any philosophical ‘system’.41 Furthermore, human beings could have no control over demons through magical practices.42 Ultimately, questions of why and how demons do what they do were unimportant; all that the faithful needed to know was that demons exist, and that they have power. Lebrun complained that the subject of magic was often treated in print either by those who were too credulous, and therefore taken in by every trick, or those who affected an ultra-sceptical attitude.43 He concluded that there was much human trickery and illusion within what was considered magic, but this did not mean that all magic was mere illusion. He argued that determining what magic was real and what unreal required effort and application, and people should not simply dismiss or accept all magic a priori:44 ‘No eagerness to see extraordinary things is necessary, but they should also not be neglected when they do arrive.’45 The key question was whether an apparently marvellous act could have been produced by human agency, or whether it was caused by the devil. Although Lebrun’s views on the power of the devil echoed those of earlier authors, his insistence on the freedom of demons against all but God and his angels undermined traditional belief in pact witchcraft, since it suggested that magicians and witches did not really exercise any power but were mere pawns of the devil. The details of the abominations committed at witches’ Sabbaths were of no importance, because it was 40

  On Lebrun and other French demonological writers of this era, see Cameron (2010), pp. 290–91. 41   Lebrun, P., Histoire Critique des Pratiques Superstitieuses (Rouen, 1702), p. 565. 42   Ibid., p. 566. 43   Ibid., pp. 571–2. 44   Ibid., pp. 573–4. 45   Ibid., p. 579.

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what the devil could do that mattered. The dissociation of demonic power from witchcraft was a first step towards portraying witches as pitiable and deluded rather than abominable agents of evil. Another step in this process was the treatment of witches as objects of prurient curiosity rather than fear. ‘Purveyors of curiosities’ dwelt with relish on the details of witchcraft. Another French priest, Jean-Baptiste Thiers (1636–1703) gave a full account of witchcraft and magic in his Traité des Superstitions (1679), as well as a comprehensive list of ecclesiastical condemnations of magical practices, which he pursued with a ‘vast encyclopaedic curiosity’.46 His intention was to collect information, not to condemn witchcraft or engage in a defence of witch-trials.47 The enduring popularity of the Traité is evidenced by its republication several times up to 1777, long after most educated French people had stopped believing in the reality of witchcraft. In the 1733–36 edition, the Traité was paired with Lebrun’s Histoire Critique.48 Cameron has observed that, in spite of his conservative approach, Thiers devoted a relatively small part of his treatise on superstition to witchcraft and demonic magic and made no attempt to defend the legal prohibition of witchcraft. His primary purpose was pastoral; he was more concerned that credulous peasants would use superstitious means to defend themselves against witches than that they would actually be victims of witchcraft themselves.49 Thiers’s primarily pastoral intentions foreshadowed Gregory Greenwood’s approach in England. The role of witchcraft in possession remained an important issue for English nuns on the Continent, especially in Carmelite monasteries. Edmund Bedingfield’s account of the exorcisms performed on Margaret and Elizabeth Mostyn at Lierre in 1651 remained ‘in the chest of three keys’ until after Elizabeth’s death in 1700,50 but this did not prevent the production of another account of the exorcisms within the convent. This was written after 1701 but before Bedingfield’s account was released, which suggests that the death of Elizabeth Mostyn may have heightened interest in the supernatural aspects of her life. This was to be expected in the context of the tradition of convent biography, but it had the effect of projecting events of the mid-seventeenth century into the early years of the eighteenth. The fragmentary eighteenth-century account referred to a ‘double diabolical witchcraft’ as the source of the possession and drew 46

  Thiers, J.-B., Traité des Superstitions, 2nd edn (Paris, 1697), vol. 1, pp. 128–73. On Thiers, see McManners (1999), p. 227; Cameron (2010), pp. 287–90. 47   Cameron (2010), p. 288. 48   Goulemot, J.-M., ‘Bibliographie du Traité’, in Thiers, J.-B. (ed. J.-M. Goulemot), Traité des Superstitions (Paris: Le Sycomore, 1984), pp. 33–4. 49   Cameron (2010), p. 288. 50   Hallett (2007b), p. 154.

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attention to the devil’s cunning ploy of allowing a possessed person to appear normal, so that their condition was not ‘esteemed anything more than what was purely natural’.51 This comment suggests some awareness of the possibility of scepticism. The majority of cases of demonic possession and witchcraft in eighteenth-century France that came to the attention of the authorities occurred in Normandy, well away from the English colleges and religious houses clustered in French Flanders at Douai, St Omer, Cambrai and Dunkirk. However, there were isolated witch trials in these places and in at least one case an English priest became involved. In June 1708, Marie Lespagnol, the wife of a tiler (‘couvreur de thuille’), was tried at Douai, accused of murdering several infants by witchcraft. One of the witnesses was a certain ‘récolet anglois’ named ‘Fr Mathias’, ‘who was said to understand these sorts of illnesses’.52 The ‘récolets’ were the Observant Franciscan Friars of St Bonaventure’s Friary, founded at Douai in 1618 in order to train Franciscans for the English mission. ‘Fr Mathias’ was almost certainly the Lancashire-born Mathias Woodward (1672–1720), professed in 1693 and ordained in 1697.53 The testimony of one of Lespagnol’s supposed victims revealed the role played by Woodward, who was apparently involved even before her son showed signs of bewitchment. Woodward advised the woman on dealing with subsequent attacks, and he was probably the source of her view that being touched by the ‘petites bestes’ vomited by her first child had made her and her second child ill. Furthermore, doctors became involved but confessed their ignorance of the symptoms, deferring to Woodward’s knowledge of matters beyond the physical: Being at prayer to the Virgin, accompanied by the said Franciscan Father who was saying prayers for the recovery of the said child, at her return the said child vomited two little creatures of the length of a pin, quite wide for their length, with a number of legs that ran very fast, so much so that she was not able to capture any but one, which she showed to several neighbours, after which the said child became a lot better. And since the said Franciscan had told her to observe lest the said child should vomit any more creatures, and in case he should vomit any more, the deponent was to throw them on the fire. And since she had not been able to trap more than one of the creatures, her second child fell ill, which she believed to be because the said creature (which was 51

  Ibid., p. 158.   Villette, P., ‘La Sorcellerie à Douai’, Mélanges de Science Religieuse 18

52

(1961), pp. 123–73, at p. 151. 53   Trappes-Lomax, R. (ed.), ‘Necrology of the English Province of Friars Minor of the Order of St Francis, 1618–1761’, in Franciscana (London: CRS, 1922), p. 294.

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the witchcraft) was vomited on the said child, and the deponent herself found herself ill, which she also believed to be witchcraft; the doctors understood nothing of it. Judging that the said Lespagnol said, passing yesterday or the day before yesterday by the house of the deponent, showing her fist, “The devil take me, I must destroy a rascal of the Rue St Julien; there will be someone who will pay me to do it”.

Shortly afterwards another inhabitant of the Rue St Julien accused Lespagnol of killing her young son, whose body was so contorted that ‘he was taken more for a monkey than for a man’, and who had suffered for fifteen months before his death from an ‘inextinguishable thirst’. Seven months after his first illness, his mother took him to Woodward, ‘who told her that the said child had been bewitched (ensorcelé) for seven months and that it was too late to cure him’.54 Woodward’s reputed skill as an exorcist and his testimony to the tribunal undoubtedly strengthened the case against Lespagnol, a rare example of an English priest involving himself in the detection of witches in his Catholic host country. It is perhaps no accident that it was a contemporary of Mathias Woodward in the community of St Bonaventure’s, John Baptist Weston, who listed among the achievements of the Christian religion that it ‘confounded Witch Crafts’ in 1718.55 In Douai, belief in witchcraft was very much alive in the early eighteenth century, and Woodward gave it the strongest possible endorsement. Cases of possession and bewitchment were especially common amongst teenagers and young adults, and a couple of cases of possession that were blamed on malevolent human agency occurred in the school attached to the English Convent in Bruges. In 1709, the young Anne Blount, a daughter of George Blount of Sodington, fell into fits. The convent annals recorded the event:56 After some of them she was like a changeling and knew nobody; the doctors and several experienced persons affirmed they had never seen or heard of anyone in so strange a way, and as we apprehended there might be something of witchcraft or that was not natural in the matter, we got a Bernardine monk to come to her, who was appointed to exorcise and pray over possessed persons, and he came several times and pray’d over her, but this spiritual remedy had no more present effect than the corporal remedies that our doctor had prescribed.

54   Villette (1961), p. 152, quoting from Archives Municipales de Douai, BB15, fol. 465. 55   Weston, J., An Abstract of the Doctrine of Jesus-Christ, or the Rule of the Frier-Minors (Douai, 1718), p. 27. 56   Durrant, C.S., A Link between Flemish Mystic and English Martyrs (London: Burns, Oates and Washbourne, 1925), pp. 434–5.

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Anne was cured suddenly on 31 January 1709 after receiving viaticum. Her cure was attested by Lewis Sabran and other clergy appointed by the Bishop of Bruges. The Jesuit Sabran was a formidable opponent of the Jansenists,57 as well as an advocate of the miraculous cure of Catherine Burton, the Antwerp Carmelite who correctly interpreted Elizabeth Osmund’s afflictions as a form of bewitchment.58 His reputation both as a judicious judge of previous miracles and a defender of supernatural phenomena may have contributed to the choice of him as a witness in the Blount case. In 1731, another pupil at Bruges, Anne Howard, a daughter of the eldest son of Bernard Howard, the Duke of Norfolk’s brother, was exorcised on the recommendation of the surgeon who attempted to treat her. He commented that if she were his child he would have her exorcised. The confessor applied for permission to the Bishop of Bruges, who ordered him to fast for three days, along with five of the canonesses. The confessor then administered the sacrament and ‘performed the ceremonies as prescribed by the Church for possessed or bewitched persons’.59 In the Blount and Howard cases, as in the Lespagnol case at Douai, physicians deferred to the expertise of exorcists when they came across a case that, in their view, was more than merely a physical affliction. The confessor at the English Convent, unlike his contemporaries on the English mission, was under the ultimate authority of a territorial ordinary, and it is evident that he expected to seek permission before performing an exorcism. The stringent fast laid down by the Bishop is an indication that, if not sceptical of exorcism per se, the ecclesiastical authorities in the Low Countries considered the rite of exorcism an exceptional and solemn course of action. In England, by contrast, although the Vicars Apostolic theoretically exercised the equivalent of territorial jurisdiction over secular clergy, there was virtually no episcopal oversight when it came to the activities of regular clergy such as the Jesuits and Benedictines. Unfortunately, there is no evidence of exorcisms on the mission itself to illuminate the attitude of superiors during this period. ‘This Uncommon Subject’: Gregory Greenwood’s Three Discourses Bossy has argued that the catechization of the Catholic community at large by means of extensive discourses on a variety of subjects was not possible until the eighteenth century.60 The Benedictine monk Gregory 57

    59   60   58

On Sabran and the Jansenists, see Duffy (1977), p. 299. Hunter (1876), p. 65. Durrant (1925), p. 435. Bossy (1979), p. 267.

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Greenwood’s Three Discourses of Witches and Witchcraft might seem thoroughly at odds with the spirit of the age in which they were written, but it is unlikely that they could have been produced at any other time.61 Greenwood spent forty years as chaplain to the Throckmorton family at Coughton Court in Warwickshire. He was born at Brize Norton in Oxfordshire and was probably the son of John Greenwood and Elizabeth Fettiplace. He was professed as a monk at St Gregory’s, Douai in August 1688 and remained there until 1702, during which time he was appointed Cellarer (in 1698). It is possible that Greenwood’s interest in witchcraft began during his time at Douai, although when the trial of Marie Lespagnol took place Greenwood was already in England.62 Greenwood went first to his birthplace at Brize Norton, then moved to Coughton in around 1704 as chaplain to Sir Robert Throckmorton, 4th Baronet, where he remained until his death in August 1744. During his time at Coughton, Greenwood rose to the most senior position on the English mission, Provincial of Canterbury. The monks were under the jurisdiction of their priors when they were in their Continental monasteries; however, in England they came under the authority of the North or South Provincials, whose territory was the same as the preReformation ecclesiastical provinces of Canterbury and York. Greenwood was appointed Definitor of the South Province in 1721 and Provincial from 1725–37. He was a particularly long-serving Provincial and there is much evidence of his administrative gifts to be found in the account books of the South Province. However, Greenwood also had theological and pastoral interests and an overwhelming compulsion to write on numerous subjects. Although nothing he wrote was ever published, Greenwood produced no less than fifteen weighty manuscript volumes of ‘Plain Testimonies’ to prove the Real Presence and other doctrines, eighteen volumes of ‘Discourses and Instructions’, a short work on the powers of holy water and a translation of the Jansenist ‘Montpellier Catechism’.63 It is very likely that Greenwood’s manuscript writings were circulated within the Catholic community and did not sit gathering dust on his shelves. Quite apart from his standing in the English Benedictine Congregation, Greenwood’s association with the Throckmortons, the acknowledged intellectual leaders of the Catholic community, rendered him an influential 61

  Greenwood’s Three Discourses (Downside Abbey MS 566) are printed as an appendix to this book. All page references are to the original MS. 62   Villette (1961), p. 173. 63   Allanson, A. (eds A. Cranmer and S. Goodwill), Biography of the English Benedictines (Ampleforth: Ampleforth Abbey, 1999), p. 175; Birt, H.N., Obit Book of the English Benedictines, 1600–1912 (Edinburgh: Mercat Press, 1913), p. 94.

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figure and many of his works appear to be transcriptions of, or written preparation for, retreats and sermons that he delivered personally. Greenwood was a popularizer and communicator rather than a theologian of any depth. His enthusiasm for ‘means of grace’ was entirely at odds with Jansenist theology and it seems unlikely that he appreciated the Jansenist overtones of the Montpellier Catechism. His patron, Sir Robert Throckmorton, sponsored the deeply anti-Jesuit Church History of England (1737–42) of Hugh Tootell (alias Charles Dodd),64 yet Greenwood’s attitude to the supernatural had more in common with the Jesuits of the seventeenth century than his fellow Benedictines of the eighteenth. Greenwood presented his most unusual treatise of all, on witchcraft, in the form of three ‘discourses’, intended to be read or preached aloud to ‘Christian Auditors’. The Three Discourses were only partially Greenwood’s own work, and depended heavily for their content and structure on an existing printed work, The Admirable History of the Possession and Conversion of a Penitent Woman (1613), a translation of Sebastian Michaelis’s account of the trial of Louis Gaufridy in 1611. Michaelis, the Dominican inquisitor who tried Gaufridy, was already famous in France for his Pneumalogia (1594), a commentary on a Latin sentence read against eighteen individuals found guilty of witchcraft at Avignon in 1582, explaining their crimes in lurid detail. Michaelis was present at the Avignon trial, although he was not the presiding judge. Greenwood’s transcription of the sentence against Gaufridy suggests that he originally intended to comment on the Gaufridy case. However, he evidently changed his mind as we hear no more of Gaufridy. Instead, for the remainder of the Discourses, Greenwood concentrated entirely on Michaelis’s Pneumalogia, which was reprinted as an appendix to the 1613 translation of The Admirable History.65 This is the same text that may have influenced the testimony of Grace Sowerbutts at the Samlesbury witch trial in 1612. Greenwood’s Discourses thus represent the tail-end of what might be seen as an attempt by some English Catholics to import ideas from Continental demonology into England. The Pneumalogia consisted of eleven Scholastic-style questions arising from the content of the sentence against the convicted witches, discussing the Biblical and Patristic evidence for specific accusations made against 64

  Scott, G., ‘The Throckmortons at Home and Abroad, 1680–1800’, in Marshall and Scott (2009), pp. 171–212, at p. 182. 65   For the original text of the Pneumalogia adapted by Greenwood, see Michaelis (1613), pp. 116–54. On Michaelis and the Gaufridy case, see Pearl, J.L., ‘French Catholic Demonologists and their Enemies in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries’, Church History 52 (1983), pp. 457–67; Ferber, S., Demonic Possession and Exorcism in Early Modern France (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 72–87.

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them. Both Michaelis and Greenwood were convinced of the entire truth of the narrative. The accusations against the Avignon witches in 1582 were among the most dramatic ever made during the course of the entire European witch-hunt, which probably explains how they made it into print in England and were still being read by Greenwood a century and a half later. Greenwood showed no awareness of the recent debate in England concerning witchcraft conducted between Francis Hutchinson, Richard Boulton and Jacques Daillon.66 On the other hand, his emphasis on the diabolical nature of atheism reflected the argument of the anonymous author of a pamphlet entitled Pisteuo-Daimon (1736) arguing against the repeal of the 1604 Witchcraft Act. A small number of opponents of repeal regarded the 1736 Act as ‘the very design of clandestine infidels’, and Porter has recognized the existence of a minor genre of anti-sceptical polemic that, whilst not necessarily defending witch-hunting, ‘was suspicious of the motives of doubters and warned of the repercussions of disbelief’.67 If Greenwood wrote his Three Discourses just before, or just after, the events of 1736 (as seems likely) then he partook of the anti-sceptical spirit of such literature, even if he was not personally familiar with it. Greenwood retained the order of Michaelis’s ‘annotations’ but imposed a new framework on the material by dividing it into three separate ‘discourses’: The First Discourse Whether the Devil, at any time, has power to appear visibly, either in human, or any Other Shape? The Second Discourse Whether the Devil can make Men renounce God, & their Baptism? Whether the Devil sometimes causes the Christian Names to be Chang’d, which were given in Baptism? Whether the Devil exacts any Homage or Tribute to be pay’d to him? Whether the Devil Markes Witches & Magicians? The Third Discourse Whether Magicians make a Circle, or no? Whether Witches use a staff & Ointment thereby to be transported & Carried thrô the Air, from one place to another? Whether Witches move, & go in the Air, from place to Place? Whether Witches Eat, Drink, & Dance at their Meetings & Rendevouz? Whether Witches worship the Devil, in the Shape of a Goat?

66

  Cameron (2010), p. 292.   Porter (1999), p. 210.

67

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Whether there be Incubi, & Succubi? That is, Whether Devils may have, or have even had carnal communication with Men, & Women, respectively, in human Shape.

Around 45 per cent of Greenwood’s Discourses consisted of his own words or quotations independently selected by him. The remaining 55 per cent was either a direct transcription of the Pneumalogia or, more often, a closely paraphrased version of Michaelis’s text. Greenwood translated the Latin sentence against the witches,68 left untranslated by W. B., but there can be no doubt that he relied on the 1613 English text rather than the Latin original, as the linguistic similarities are at times very marked indeed. Greenwood’s departures from Michaelis’s text are indicative of his distinctive pastoral intentions in adapting the Pneumalogia for an English audience. In the first annotation, Greenwood included a digression of his own on the wickedness of the poor grumbling against their lot. Michaelis attributed the devil worship of the Avignon witches to their desperation at a time of famine, but Greenwood was preoccupied to an even greater extent than the inquisitor with the idea that the poor might be tempted to deny or question God:69 Poor & indigent People must humbly submit, & patiently resign themselves, to the appointments of God’s adorable Providence, under the necessities, distresses, & Calamities, which he is pleas’d from time to time, to inflict upon ’em. They must not Grumble, mutter, & complain, as many are \too/ apt to do, in their frantic fits, & their passionate, & fretful humours against that God that made ’em, Their Soverain, & Divine Lord, Creatour, & Redeemer, & best of Benefactours to ’em; Their God, their Father, & their Friend, to whom entirely they are beholden, for all they have, & are; & whatever they can hope to \ enjoy/ hereafter in heaven & immortal glory. Let ’em Not dare to presume to accuse the \irreproachable/ justice of God, of Partiality in bestowing his Guifts & Blessings upon Men, Temporal or Spiritual.

Greenwood noted in the margin ‘Let them think what they will’, suggesting that some in his intended audience were themselves among the grumblers. Greenwood’s emphasis on ‘God’s adorable Providence’ and his condemnation of human complaints against God recall Leibniz’s optimism as well as Pope’s classic theodicy founded on the exposition of human weakness, An Essay on Man. Greenwood did not, however, share Pope’s view that ‘Satan now is wiser than of yore, / And tempts by making rich, not making poor’.70 He attacked what he saw as an attempt by the 68

  Three Discourses, fols 1–8.   Ibid., fols 27–8. 70   Pope, A., ‘Epistle III. To Allen Lord Bathurst’, ll. 351–352 (Poems, pp. 584–5). 69

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poor to overthrow God by questioning their lowly position, which was tantamount to diabolism. Where Michaelis merely alluded to the temptations of Christ in the first annotation, Greenwood repeated the whole story, suggesting that he did not expect his hearers to be familiar with it.71 In the second annotation, Greenwood emphasized the dangers of denying the Trinity and added deists, free-thinkers and latitudinarians to Michaelis’s catalogue of the godless, claiming that their God was really Satan:72 Some [the devil] has prevail’d with to become downright Atheists, to believe that there is no God at all: Others He has perswaded to become Deists; to believe indeed that there is a God, a Providence, Vertues & Vices, The Immortality of the Soul, & Rewards, & Punishments after Death; but to believe nothing of any reveal’d Religion. Others He has taught to turn Arians, & Socinians, to deny the Son of God to be coequal, Coeternal, & Consubstantial to the Father; & consequently to disbelieve the ever Blessed, & undivided Trinity.

Greenwood argued that denial of the doctrine of the Trinity was one of the devil’s chief devices to turn people against God. To the Sabellians and Arians denounced by Michaelis, he added ‘the Socinians, Free-thinkers, & Latitudinarians, who swarm up & down this kingdom, in the days that we live in’.73 He was also troubled by the levity with which the doctrine of the Trinity was discussed in society at large: Nay some Incredulous Miscreants there have been, & too many alass! there are, at this very \day/ in this unhappy kingdom, so insolently Bold, as openly & barefaced, to make a mockery, & a mere banter of it; passing ever & anon, in a sporting way, some witty joke, upon it, to divert the Company.74

Greenwood added to Michaelis’s second annotation a translation of the rites of exorcism in the liturgy of baptism, apparently based on an earlier digression on the same subject in his treatise on holy water. However, the extracts from the rite included in his Discourses were more extensive. Greenwood qualified Michaelis’s account of satanic temptation with a strong insistence on human free will that, even if not consciously anti-Jansenist, was appropriate for an age less reluctant to limit the devil’s power:75

71

    73   74   75   72

Three Discourses, fols 32–4. Ibid., fol. 48. Ibid., fol. 46. Ibid., fol. 57. Ibid., fol. 54.

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But this is what they cannot force, or Compel Christians by any violent means to do; Tis what, they are aware, is quite beyond their Power, & what God never dos, nor never will permit: This puts ’em upon other crafty shifts, & forces ’em to go some other way to work, to bring their design about. They are sensible, that tis Impossible ever to effect it, utterly in vain even to attempt it, unless by their sly Temptations, or some other false delusions, they can inveigle us in, freely to consent to disbelieve the Trinity.

Greenwood’s version of the third annotation returned to a pastoral theme when he included a very brief warning against the ‘Fatal Consequences’ of Protestant baptism.76 This was intended as a swipe against Catholics in mixed marriages who agreed to have their children baptized in the parish church but brought them up as Catholics. Greenwood added virtually nothing to the fourth and fifth annotations, but he chose to enliven Michaelis’s description of the experiences of the boy who exposed the Avignon witches in the sixth. Michaelis stated only that ‘hee was much affrighted, and making the signe of the Crosse he spake these words, Iesu what is the meaning of this? Whereupon they all vanished away, and the young man remained all alone.’77 Greenwood helpfully tells us what the boy actually said in French, a reminder that the author spent fourteen years in a French town still in fear of witches:78 He was terrified so exceedingly, that making the sign of the Cross, w[hi]ch is as great a terrour to the Devils, as the Devils were to him, He spoke these words, in the Language of that Country, Jesu! Que veut dire cela? O Jesus! What is the meaning of all this? Upon which, the Devils, & all the Company vanish’d, & disappear’d immediatly; and left the poor young boy, horribly frightened as he was, all alone in the dark, at midnight, to shift for himself.

Greenwood added a story derived from Gregory Nazianzen, in which Julian the Apostate made the sign of the cross in terror after raising a demon, and thereby drove it away.79 This was a story with a long pedigree in Reformation controversy, since it appeared to show that the power of sacramentals did not depend in any way on the faith of those who used them, and Cameron has argued that its popularity in Counter-Reformation literature reinforced the view that Christian rites had ‘automatic or mechanical effects’.80 In the 1560s, James Calfhill argued that the devil’s 76

    78   79   80   77

Ibid., fols 69–70. Michaelis (1613), p. 134. Three Discourses, fol. 84. Ibid., fols 82–3. Cameron (2010), p. 232.

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obedience to Julian’s action was a demonic endorsement of the sign of the cross, while John Martiall insisted that the cross ‘of it selfe, through the power and force, that Christ by his passion gave unto it, put the wicked spirites to flight’.81 Alban Butler later used the story in his Moveable Feasts, Fasts and other annual Observances of the Catholic Church (1774) to illustrate a similar point.82 By appealing to the Julian story, Greenwood situated himself in the same tradition as the seventeenth-century English Jesuits who were prepared to allow Protestants to use holy water and Agnus Deis on the grounds that they might be converted by their efficacy. The seventh annotation in Greenwood’s version featured a digression on the difference between grave robbers and grave riflers that seems to have been designed to demonstrate Greenwood’s knowledge of Greek,83 while in the eighth annotation, he returned to the temptations of Christ and included the story of the contest between St Peter and Simon Magus taken from Hegessipus via the Chronicle of Eusebius.84 Greenwood’s ninth annotation featured a more detailed enumeration of the sins committed at the witches’ Sabbath than Michaelis gave, including ‘Immoderate Excesses in Drinking, beyond all sense & Reason’, whoredom, self-abuse, lewdness, wantonness, debauchery, lasciviousness, luxury, idolatry, witchcraft and murder.85 Greenwood’s version of the tenth annotation was significantly truncated, and his version of the eleventh annotation (on incubi and succubi) departed entirely from Michaelis’s model. Greenwood declined to discuss the issue directly, claiming that he considered it harmful to his audience to know too much about sexual relations between demons and human beings. On the other hand, he was anxious that his refusal to discuss it would lead his hearers to dismiss it as mere fantasy:86 Should I discours of it, & make my remarks upon it, as hitherto I have done in answering to the Other Querys; I should break thrô all the Rules, & transgress the usual Bounds of Modesty, & common Decency; Should I say nothing of it, but wrap it up in silence, I might seem to you, by so doing, to look upon it, as a meer flam, an Idle story, a groundless report, or a Silly Whim, & nothing real in it.

In the end, Greenwood declared that ‘Tis enough for you to know; & for me to tell you, That tis certain, & undeniable, that such a Horrid, Brutish, 81

    83   84   85   86   82

Martiall (1566), p. 29v. Butler (1774), p. 379. Three Discourses, fol 93. Ibid., fols 99–102. Ibid., fols 104–5. Ibid., fol. 114.

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Hellish Sin there is; & that Devils & Witches of both Sexes, are abominably guilty of it, in their nightly Meetings, at their Common Rendevous.’ He insisted that the Avignon case proved the reality of incubi and succubi and that their existence was supported by numerous authorities, although he declined to cite them. Greenwood omitted some parts of Michaelis’s text from his version, and what he chose to leave out is as revealing as what he added. He ignored almost entirely the Pneumalogia’s apocalyptic themes, systematically removing all references to Antichrist and all but one to the devil as ‘the Beast’.87 He excised a lengthy discussion of Antichrist from the first annotation.88 A similar mention of Antichrist, along with an argument that devils ‘exceedingly haunt fountaines and pooles’, was absent from his version of the second annotation.89 Greenwood omitted from the third annotation Michaelis’s vigorous condemnation of those who named their children after ‘sinful men’, his observations on barbarous German customs, and his complaint that people neglected the sacrament of confirmation as a reaffirmation of their baptismal vows.90 In the sixth annotation, Greenwood declined to mention Cornelius Agrippa, ‘a great favourer of the sect of the Beast’, probably because he believed it was more harmful to mention such a notorious magician than to condemn him. He also declined to include the prophecy attributed to Julian the Apostate that the sign of a cross enclosed in a circle was the ‘mark of the beast’ that indicated the beginning of the apocalypse.91 Greenwood removed from the seventh annotation a discussion of the methods by which the devil stole young children,92 as well as the recipe for the magical ointment used by the witches in Apuleius’ Golden Ass.93 A further apocalyptic reference to the devil as ‘the red Dragon’ was also expunged. He omitted Pliny the Elder’s remarks against the resurrection of the body and truncated Michaelis’s discussion of anthropophagy and his exposition of Aquinas’s views on the aerial bodies assumed by demons.94 Greenwood also excluded a lengthy discussion of bodily transformations, including ‘the myracles of Antichrist’.95 In the tenth 87   On the importance of apocalypticism in the work of French demonologists of the sixteenth century, see Pearl (1983), p. 458. 88   Michaelis (1613), pp. 121–3. 89   Ibid., p. 126. 90   Ibid., pp. 129–31. 91   Ibid., p. 135. 92   Michaelis (1613), p. 138. 93   Ibid., pp. 139–40. 94   Ibid., pp. 143–5. 95   Ibid., pp. 145–7.

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annotation, the pattern of excluding apocalyptic references continued, along with a discussion of whether Scripture supported the view that the devil transformed himself into a goat.96 Greenwood included none of Michaelis’s discussion of incubi and succubi. It is likely that Greenwood excluded some portions of the Pneumalogia from the Three Discourses on the grounds that they were so densely packed with scholarly references that they would daunt his listeners. In some cases, however, considerations of delicacy came into play, such as when he declined to discuss incubi and succubi and omitted references to Agrippa and certain heresies. However, it seems unlikely that Greenwood so thoroughly divested the Pneumalogia of its eschatological content on the grounds that it would have offended his listeners’ sensibilities. Rather, Michaelis’s comments on the Book of Revelation were either irrelevant to his listeners in the eighteenth century, or too much of a distraction from the main thrust of the text. Greenwood’s omission of Michaelis’s comments on the sacrament of confirmation made sense in an English context. The jurisdiction of the Vicars Apostolic covered such a large area that it was difficult for them to confirm all Catholics, and many went unconfirmed for most of their lives, or received confirmation late in life. It would have been unreasonable for Greenwood to criticize his audience for ignoring this sacrament. In spite of its backward-looking subject matter and condemnation of free-thinkers, latitudinarians and deists, the language of Greenwood’s Three Discourses was not unaffected by the common cultural tropes of the Enlightenment. Michaelis referred to pagans ‘who governed themselves moraly well according to the law and light of nature’.97 In Greenwood’s version, these became pagans ‘who lived morally well, according to the light of Nature, & the Common law of Reason, & good sense’.98 No concept of ‘the Common law of Reason’ is to be found in Michaelis; without realising it, Greenwood was a child of the Enlightenment. In answering the question of why Gregory Greenwood, uniquely among English Catholics, chose to write on witchcraft, the original intentions of the Pneumalogia need first to be considered. Marc Venard has observed that the Pneumalogia abounded in obscene and hallucinatory details of the witches’ Sabbath, wrung from the accused by torture, and intended to sustain popular fantasies.99 For Venard, the Inquisition at Avignon was not so less interested in combating witchcraft as maleficia, the harm done to any specific individuals, and more interested in exposing the existence 96

Ibid., pp. 149–51. Michaelis (1613), p. 128. Three Discourses , fol. 64. Venard, M., Réforme Protestante, Réforme Catholique dans la Province d’Avignon au XVIe siècle (Paris: Cerf, 1993), p. 797.     98   99   97

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of a satanic sect offering homage to the devil.100 The trials took place at a time of relative calm in the conflict between Catholics and Protestants in France, and Venard has suggested that, in some symbolic way, the imaginary sect of devil-worshippers took the place of Protestant heretics as objects of hatred and abhorrence.101 There is one point of correspondence between Venard’s characterization of sixteenth-century France and eighteenth-century England. By the time Greenwood wrote his Three Discourses, active persecution of English Catholics by the state had ceased. If Venard is right that, at a time of calm, the Catholic authorities at Avignon sought out new enemies, it is possible that in a world of increasingly warm relations between Catholics and Protestants in England, Greenwood was endeavouring to present atheists and deists as diabolical enemies. This interpretation is borne out by the emphasis he placed on the wickedness of denying the Trinity. Furthermore, in spite of his apparent credulity, Greenwood was noncommittal when it came to the question of whether witchcraft still existed in his own day. The subject of the discourses was ‘horrid abominations … that have been Acted by Devils in former ages, & may still perhaps be practis’d, up & down the world, thô unknown to us, even at this very day’ (my italics). Large sections of Greenwood’s Three Discourses did not dwell on the devil and witchcraft at all, and when expanding Michaelis’s text, Greenwood often ran into lengthy pastoral digressions. Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to say that Greenwood’s Discourses stripped the Pneumalogia of its apocalyptic character, turning it into a framework for essentially pastoral exhortations. These exhortations were unremarkable in themselves, but Greenwood’s choice of a treatise on demonology to frame them was both eccentric and incongruous. He acknowledged that witchcraft was an ‘uncommon Subject’, but insisted that it was an ‘important Subject’ for his listeners to know about.102 However, the lack of any firm affirmation on Greenwood’s part that witchcraft was a real and present threat belies the idea that he was genuinely seeking to educate his listeners about witches. If anything, his treatise served to teach them about the devil, and the Avignon witches stood as grotesque exemplars of people who had given in to diabolical temptations in the most dramatic way. In Geoffrey Scott’s view, ‘What [Greenwood’s] bizarre purpose was in drafting three discourses on … French witches and witchcraft, which described in minute detail erotic villainies of the devil for the gentlefolk and peasantry of south Warwickshire … cannot be fathomed.’103 Scott, so 100

    102   103   101

Venard (1993), p. 798. Ibid., p. 795. Three Discourses, fol. 121. Scott, in Marshall and Scott (2009), p. 183.

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far the only historian to have examined Greenwood at all, has portrayed Greenwood as something of a crank whose views were not typical of the Catholic community in his time.104 It may well be true that Greenwood’s views had nothing in common with those of his Warwickshire congregation, but on the other hand, Greenwood made no direct attempt to relate his commentary to contemporary English concerns at all. Greenwood was not a deranged eccentric, but a priest who spent the formative years of his life in France. His Three Discourses were commentary in the French demonological tradition, with resonances in high church anti-sceptical literature. The example of Mathias Woodward at Douai demonstrates that Greenwood was not an entirely isolated figure among the Catholic clergy. Although he was the only English priest we know of who committed his preoccupation with witchcraft to paper, he was not so isolated when one considers the continuing output of demonological writing in France. Greenwood’s Three Discourses were but one small component of an enormous literary output that was itself just one aspect of a distinguished and dedicated ecclesiastical career, and it seems unfair to write Greenwood off as a crank. A comparison of the text with the Pneumalogia reveals that, far from indulging pruriently in the ‘erotic villainies’ of the Avignon witches, Greenwood censored them for his English audience. McManners has observed that a minority of clergy in eighteenth-century France produced ambiguous works on witchcraft that appealed to the popular desire for shocking stories and moral condemnation. Yet they were driven not by Michaelis’s Counter-Reformation zeal against the devotees of Satan but by an encyclopaedic instinct and a mania for collecting curiosities of nature. Greenwood’s ambiguity concerning the question of whether witches still existed in his own day is evidence that, perhaps unwittingly, he fell into the category of collector of curiosities rather than outdated zealot. Greenwood did not date his manuscript and there are few internal clues that allow accurate dating. However, it is likely that he wrote it before 1736. Greenwood referred to the execution of witches ‘as the Laws both of God & Man in such cases direct’,105 the use of the present tense suggesting that he was writing before the passage of the 1736 Witchcraft Act which repealed the statute of 1604. It is possible, of course, that Greenwood was ignorant of the change in law or that he was referring purely to the French situation. By the 1730s, the Witchcraft Act had not been invoked for many years and there is no reason why Greenwood, a monk trained on the Continent, should have been expert in English law. He made use of translations of exorcisms from his earlier treatise on holy water, which can be dated to between 1723 and 1730. In this treatise, Greenwood made 104

  Scott (1992), p. 139.   Three Discourses, fol. 8.

105

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reference to the consecration ceremonies of ‘New Churches lately built, by order of a late act of Parliament, in the Reign of Queen Anne’.106 The first of these churches to be consecrated after Queen Anne’s death were St John’s, Clerkenwell and St Mary le Strand in 1723.107 In 1730 and 1731, further Acts of Parliament were passed to build more churches.108 Unless Greenwood was ignorant of these acts, then his treatise on holy water was written between 1723 and 1730. On the basis of this evidence, Greenwood probably wrote his Discourses between 1730 and 1736, and not as late as the 1740s as Scott suggested.109 Gregory Greenwood can be seen as a representative of a conservative anti-sceptical tradition that was still alive in the 1730s, albeit marginal. Alternatively, he may be viewed as an English Jean-Baptiste Thiers, a ‘passive’ believer in witchcraft fascinated by the Avignon case, rather than the advocate of an inquisitorial campaign against witches in mideighteenth-century Warwickshire. Had Greenwood’s Discourses ever made it into print then the reactions they produced from the Catholic and non-Catholic world would doubtless have given us a better idea of how typical his interest was. Davies has observed that witchcraft was a subject much discussed in private company by gentlemen as late as the 1760s, even if they were not prepared to admit to this in public.110 Doubtless this was true of the Catholic gentry as well and we may imagine Greenwood’s treatise circulating privately amongst the devout and curious.

106   Gregory Greenwood, ‘A Short Account of the Blessings of the Catholick Church, Particularly of Holy Water’, Downside Abbey MS 675, fols 22–3. 107   Port, M.H. (ed.), The Commissions for Building Fifty New Churches: The Minute Books, 1711–27, a Calendar (London: London Record Society, 1986), p. 242. 108   Rudé, G.F.E., Hanoverian London, 1714–1808 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), p. 102. 109   Scott (1992), p. 139. On the back flyleaf of Greenwood’s MS is a note of the ‘golden numbers’ and dates of Easter from 1746–80. Since Greenwood died in 1744 and the handwriting does not resemble his, it seems likely that this note was made by a later monk reusing the MS book (which was not an uncommon occurrence). 110   Davies (1999), p. 9.

CHAPTER 6

Dealing with the Devil: Catholic Exorcisms For John Bossy, the Catholic clergy’s ministry of exorcism was a hangover from the mediaeval period, ‘more relevant to the pastoral situation of the pre-Reformation … clergy than to that of the missionary priest’. Nevertheless, Bossy was obliged to acknowledge that the regular reporting of exorcisms demonstrated that the ministry was at the centre rather than the periphery of the life of a Catholic priest in England until the middle of the seventeenth century.1 Bossy’s view that exorcism disappeared at this time along with the priest’s role in pacifying feuds will be questioned in this chapter, along with his view that the Jesuits did not take exorcism any more seriously than other priests. On the contrary, there is significant evidence for exorcisms after the Civil War and time and again, the Jesuits were the moving spirits behind most exorcisms, even if they sometimes involved secular clergy as well. Since Bossy’s original treatment, two rather different views of early modern Catholic exorcisms in England have emerged. On the one hand, Walsham regarded exorcism as one of several forms of ‘magical healing’, an essentially therapeutic activity to be discussed within the context of Catholic responses to the miraculous in general. Exorcism was ‘a crucial arm of the Tridentine missionary campaign to reconcile schismatics and evangelize Protestants’.2 However, Walsham retained Bossy’s caution, seeing exorcisms as a combination of ‘artificially induced’ displays for missionary purposes and ‘a simple response to a popular need’.3 Exorcism was a symbol of the wider conversion of England: ‘the dramatic ritual of ejecting devils evolved into the theatrical expulsion of the evil spirit of Calvinism itself.’4 Davies, on the other hand, whilst not denying the therapeutic function of exorcism, has emphasized the links between exorcism, possession and witchcraft, observing that exorcism was often a means to detect and combat

1

    3   4   2

Bossy (1979), pp. 265–7. Walsham (2003), p. 801. Bossy (1979), p. 267. Walsham (1999), p. 242.

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witches.5 Exorcists used a popular need as an opportunity for mission. I have argued elsewhere that this caused exorcists to compromise with popular beliefs.6 A mediaeval hangover would hardly have been so flexible. Exorcism was unquestionably a Counter-Reformation preoccupation, not the remnants of a pre-Reformation healing function of the priesthood. Contrary to Bossy’s view, demand for exorcism did not come solely or even primarily from the illiterate;7 there is plenty of evidence for interest in exorcism among the Catholic gentry. The views of Walsham and Davies are not mutually exclusive. Walsham’s omission of witchcraft in her discussion of Catholic exorcisms is striking, but on the other hand it would be a mistake to see exorcism primarily and exclusively as ‘unbewitching’. Many exorcisms did not involve suspicions of witchcraft at all, and the liturgy of exorcism was grounded in a developed theology of demonic possession far older than early modern witch-beliefs. Stuart Clark, Steven Connor and Nicky Hallett have observed that the idea of possession was not disturbing to early modern Christians, many of whom regarded it as an experience that existed on a spiritual continuum with other forms of engagement with the spiritual world, such as meditative prayer.8 Witches were but one spiritual problem to which exorcism was the church’s ultimate response, and treating exorcism alongside miracles has its disadvantages. Unlike miraculous healers, exorcists engaged with supernatural powers other than God. Whilst the exorcism itself was accomplished by God’s power, just like any other healing miracle, the power of Satan was confronted during the course of the exorcism and, to a certain extent, Satan was conjured to display his power in the theatre of exorcism. This aspect of exorcism (engagement with Satan as a being of power) troubled early modern religious consciences. Furthermore, as Walsham observed, a danger existed in the theatre of exorcism that the demoniac’s performance could outshine the exorcist and, in so doing, undermine his authority and that of society as a whole.9 Consequently, exorcism was a controversial issue that divided the Catholic clergy between ‘missionaries who preferred to err on the side of humanist caution and those who were willing to take the risks linked with evangelical enthusiasm’.10 5

Davies (1999), pp. 27–9. Young (2009), pp. pp. 487–507. Bossy (1979), p. 267. Clark (1997), p. 391; Connor, S., Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 111; Hallett (2007b), p. 16. 9   Walsham (2003), p. 804. 10   Ibid., pp. 804–5.     7   8   6

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A study of exorcism is the natural culmination of a book on Catholic attitudes to the supernatural, since exorcism represented the church’s ultimate solution to problems generated by non-divine supernatural forces. The three purposes served by exorcism were aptly summed up by Gregory Greenwood:11 The Word Exorcism … is so call’d, from an Ancient Ceremony, which the Church has always practised, since the beginning of Christianity, & still dayly uses by the Ministry of Her Priests, empower’d & commission’d expressly by Jesus Christ Himself; to Eject, or Cast forth devils, out of the Bodies, which they Possess, or which they Obsess: or out of any other Creatures whatsoever, Animate or Inanimate.

Greenwood’s definition covers virtually all of the purposes for which exorcism was used. First, it was used to cast devils out of possessed human bodies. Secondly, obsession, as opposed to possession, was vexation by demons who, rather than taking full control of a person’s body, vexed them spiritually; in this case, exorcism could relieve a troubled spirit. Third, exorcism could be used on animals, and finally it could be used on inanimate objects. Greenwood was thinking of the exorcism of salt and water, but his point applies equally to houses, which could become ‘possessed’ by what would later be called ‘poltergeist’ phenomena. In practice, a single exorcism might accomplish more than one of these effects. The table in Appendix 1 below summarizes 29 reported exorcisms in England between 1577 and 1815 which involved a Catholic priest (one case which involved a Catholic layman is also included). The obstacles to any kind of meaningful statistical analysis of Catholic exorcisms in postReformation England are significant, and Appendix 1 is intended as a summary of the evidence rather than a tool for the social historian. Catholic sources such as the Jesuit Annual Letters anonymized missioners as a matter of course, and often stated that many exorcisms had taken place without giving any details of time, place and circumstances. Protestant accounts, on the other hand, were more likely to name priests but were hostile. Of the 29 exorcisms, 24 were recorded in Catholic sources. Only two were recorded in both Catholic and Protestant sources: Weston’s exorcisms (in Weston’s Autobiography and Harsnett’s Declaration) and the incident of the ‘Boy of Bilson’ (in the Catholic pamphlet reprinted by Baddely and his subsequent commentary). The fact that more exorcisms were reported by Catholics than by Protestants suggests that exorcism accounts were primarily an instrument of Catholic evangelism rather than a Protestant slur against Catholics. However, the allegations in Harsnett’s Declaration 11

  Downside Abbey MS 675, fol. 1.

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and Baddely’s Boy of Bilson were often repeated in other Protestant works. New tales were not needed to reinforce the stereotype that Catholics faked exorcisms and abused demoniacs. For Catholics, on the other hand, new evidence of the miraculous work of God was always welcome. Jesuits performed 19 of the 29 exorcisms, with secular priests cooperating with Jesuits in two cases. Eleven of the 29 cases took place after the end of the English Civil War, suggesting that Bossy was wrong to see the Civil War as a watershed marking the end of exorcism as a clerical role. Instead, the most noticeable lacuna was between 1696 and 1815, when no exorcisms were recorded as taking place in England. The 1670s, rather than the 1640s, was when exorcisms either ceased to be reported, or went into a rapid decline. In six cases, a room or building was exorcized rather than a person, and the most common locations for exorcisms were Lancashire and London – unsurprising given that the greatest density of Catholics was in Lancashire and events in London were most likely to be reported. In eleven cases, the victim was a non-Catholic, another indication of the evangelistic potential of exorcism. In several more cases, the confessional identity of the victim is unclear. However, possession and exorcism, just like haunting, could serve as a strong incentive for occasional conformists and defectors to return to enthusiastic practice of Catholicism. The Reformation and the Evolution of Exorcism Since exorcism was an exercise of authority, every post-Reformation exorcism was to some extent a political act. Whoever performed a successful exorcism could claim to be the recipient of divine power granted to him because he belonged to the true church. From the 1580s onwards, exorcism and ‘prophesyings’ were discouraged by Elizabeth’s government and became the preserve of the godly ‘puritans’. The most famous of the semi-legitimate Elizabethan puritan exorcists, John Darrell, was sometimes in direct competition with Catholic priests during his numerous campaigns in the 1580s and ’90s.12 Where priests failed, Darrell stepped in, such as in the case of Nicholas Starkie of Cleworth.13 Darrell fully expected Catholics in Lancashire to convert once they saw his power.14 However, Thomas Freeman has taken issue with Walker’s conclusion that Darrell’s exorcisms were driven by an anti-Catholic agenda.15 The evidence suggests that, like later witchfinders, Darrell and his supporters directed their 12

    14   15   13

For a detailed study of Darrell’s campaign, see Gibson (2006). Walker (1981), p. 57. Oldridge (2010), p. 159. Walker (1981), p. 5.

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rhetoric primarily against ‘ungodly’ figures within the established church like Harsnett and Archbishop Bancroft.16 The political and controversial potential of exorcisms led to their becoming intensely dramatic events, in which the exorcist would take the opportunity to interrogate devils about theology in the course of expulsion: ‘Satan was prevailed upon to act as a catechist.’17 This ‘conjuration’ of devils troubled some Protestants, who considered it too similar to the Catholic rite of pre-baptismal exorcism and akin to ritual magic.18 The view of exorcism as illicit conjuration was articulated most forcefully by Reginald Scot, although Scot’s condemnation of the mass, exorcism and popular witchcraft beliefs together as part of a single fabric of superstition proved too radical to gain acceptance for over a century. Nevertheless, Scot was undeniably influential on Protestant opinion. He originated the long-lived anti-Catholic association between priestcraft and sorcery,19 but his underlying message of scepticism was lost on many readers. Scot never considered Catholics guilty of actual sorcery; rather, he considered magicians and Catholics equally deserving of contempt and mockery. Scot’s approach was undoubtedly embraced by ordinary Protestants. The Jesuit martyr Robert Southwell claimed that the prolific exorcist John Cornelius was ‘called by the Protestants a conjurer and enchanter’ in the 1580s, suggesting that Scot’s view was widely held.20 John Gee called into question the effectiveness of Catholic exorcisms, pointing to instances of individuals ‘which either were or seemed to bee indivelled’ whom the priests had failed to exorcize.21 Exorcisms also failed when Catholics went on pilgrimage to foreign shrines in the hope of deliverance, a feature of English Catholic piety for which no evidence survives other than Gee’s mockery. Gee turned to his advantage the fact that mystical piety and possession could appear so similar, pointing to Catholics who claimed to be ‘possessed’ by ‘heavenly and glorious guests’. In 1616, two girls at the Gatehouse in Westminster named Amy and Mary claimed to be possessed by the Virgin Mary as well as ‘Saint Michael the Arch-Angell, Saint Iohn the Baptist, M. Molineux the Martyr, and 16

  Freeman (2000), p. 37.   Walsham (2003), p. 803. 18   On the issue of Catholic baptism as exorcism, see Kelly, H.A., The Devil at 17

Baptism: The Demonic Dramaturgy of Christian Initiation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985); Nischan, B., ‘The Exorcism Controversy and Baptism in the Late Reformation’, Sixteenth Century Journal 18 (1987), pp. 31–52; Johnstone (2006), pp. 63–6. 19   Scot, R., The Discoverie of Witchcraft (London, 1584), pp. 375–6. 20   Foley, vol. 3, p. 445. 21   Gee (1624), pp. 51–2.

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M. Roberts the Martyr, and divers other aswell Masculine as Feminine Saints’. One of the priests who publicized the girls, Edward Hands (d. 1625),22 went into trances and claimed to be ‘corporally possessed’ by the Trinity, speaking in the name of God.23 For Gee, the example of Hands demonstrated that possession, whether by good spirits or bad, was nothing more than a tool used by Catholics as and when it suited them. If exorcism was challenged by the Reformation it was also challenged by the Counter-Reformation. The post-Tridentine church was alive to the dangers of superstition, the abuse of sacramentals and the potential of both exorcists and demoniacs to disrupt the good order of church and society. Matters were complicated by the fact that, until 1614, there was no officially approved rite of exorcism for the entire church and multiple local variations of the rite existed. Furthermore, there was no official guidance from Rome on who could exorcize and it remained at the discretion of individual bishops. Recent scholarship on the European Counter-Reformation has tended to emphasize the survival of mediaeval practices in modified forms rather than their out-and-out suppression. Cameron has drawn attention to the differences in approach to exorcism in the works of the Jesuit Del Rio and the Franciscan Girolamo Menghi. Whereas Del Rio was suspicious of the use of physical objects such as ‘suffumigations of sulphur’ against the devil, Menghi prescribed elaborate preparations of herbs, wax and fire, and recommended invoking God by exotic Greek and Hebrew names.24 In England, a mission territory, there were no local ordinaries to arbitrate competing approaches. In his Historia Particular de la Persecucion de Inglaterra (1599), Diego de Yepes, confessor to Phillip II, reported that one of the earliest seminary priests, John Nelson (d. 1578) was informed of his impending arrest by a devil he cast out of the body of a demoniac.25 However, De Yepes was writing twenty years after the event and his information concerning the English mission was largely obtained indirectly; this story certainly cannot be taken as evidence that the first seminary priests had a coherent policy on exorcism. One late sixteenth-century manual of casuistry, which was intended to resolve difficult questions arising on the English mission, reflected the anxiety generated by this issue. In response to a question concerning what rite of exorcism should be used, the authors noted that a certain French missal contained a rite, and that ‘Some do practise, but I knowe not there maner.’ At a synod in Milan, Robert Bellarmine had determined that no 22

    24   25   23

Bellenger (1984), p. 67. Gee (1624), pp. 54–7. Del Rio (2000 [1595]), pp. 115–16; Cameron (2010), pp. 235–7. De Yepes (1599), vol. 1, p. 97; Challoner (1803 [1741]), vol. 1, p. 12.

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priest could exorcize unless authorized by the bishop and examined in his learning and morals, but this was merely a local regulation. Ultimately, those priests who complained that ‘here is great need of such helpe’ were told that they should consult a pious and prudent confessor for advice.26 Confusion and ignorance concerning the appropriate circumstances and resources required for exorcism hindered its effectiveness as a missionary tool. In 1596, the non-Catholic Nicholas Starkie, concerned about possession in his Lancashire household, ‘went to a Seminarie Priest, who could do no good, because (forsooth) he had not then his bookes’.27 Starkie turned instead to a ‘witch’ named Hartley who used ‘certayne popish charmes’, before resorting to Darrell. William Allen and Robert Parsons, when presented with similar queries about the permissibility and effectiveness of exorcisms, stressed that their effectiveness depended entirely on God’s will and not on the efforts of the exorcist. God might not allow the exorcism, and the exorcist’s failure could give great scandal to bystanders (an indication that exorcism was more often than not a public, theatrical event). After all, God might decide that being possessed was good for someone, or punish the unworthiness of the exorcist or the hard-hearted incredulity of the witnesses. Allen and Parsons advised that, whilst priests were not bound to avoid exorcising, it was just as important to teach the faithful that the exorcism might not work. Exorcisms should preferably be performed in private, cautiously, prudently and rarely.28 It is easy to view these expressions of caution from the most senior figures in the Catholic community as characteristic clerical attempts to control lay access to sacramentals, like those that occurred in other European countries at this time. In Walsham’s view, the clergy regarded exorcism as inherently dangerous; it had the capacity to empower the laity, and the demoniac’s performance could outshine the priest’s.29 Nevertheless, the English situation was unusual and the shortage of priests encouraged the clergy ‘to make tactical concessions to the indigenous culture by which they were confronted’.30 Unfortunately, Walsham’s choice of words suggests that the missionary clergy in England were no different from missionaries to India and China encountering an alien culture, when in fact they were themselves part of the ‘indigenous culture’. The training of

26

  Holmes, P.J., Elizabethan Casuistry (London: CRS, 1981), p. 16.   More, G., A True Discourse concerning the certaine Possession and

27

Dispossessio[n] of 7 Persons in one Familie in Lancashire (Middelburg, 1600), pp. 22–3. 28   Holmes (1981), pp. 89–90. 29   Walsham (2003), p. 804. 30   Ibid., p. 782.

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a Counter-Reformation seminary may have been thorough, but it did not turn priests into cultural aliens in their own homeland. The evidence for ‘tactical concessions’ is lacking in accounts of exorcisms in England by Catholic priests. Certainly there was no shortage of concessions, but there is no evidence that they were ‘tactical’ and controlled, with priests unwilling to trust the laity and shying away from exorcism. Indeed, quite the opposite picture emerges. The Jesuits were prepared to exorcize virtually anyone or anything, even if they considered a person’s suffering to be mental or moral rather than spiritual. There is convincing evidence that the Jesuits actively encouraged the laity’s appropriation of sacramentals, and no evidence that this was a source of anxiety to the clergy.31 Not only did the Jesuits encourage exorcism of everything by everyone, but they also fostered ‘indigenous’ beliefs in witchcraft and familiar spirits. It has not been (and perhaps cannot be) proven that a silent body of secular priests who were horrified by Jesuit exorcisms did not exist. However, in the absence of episcopal oversight, it is hardly surprising that the clergy should have explored the limits of their authority, and the participation of secular clergy in several Jesuit exorcisms was a consequence of their independence and empowerment as much as lay ‘congregationalism’. However, perhaps to avoid canonical disputes, the Jesuits tended to avoid using ‘official’ liturgical methods of exorcism and instead deployed confession, declarations of faith and holy water. This displays at least some sensitivity to concerns about the misuse of sacramentals, but it was hardly in the spirit of austere reformers like Bellarmine. For exorcists, England was a land of promise. In 1604, the new Canons of the established church virtually prohibited exorcism. According to Canon 72, no minister, unless he had special permission from his bishop, was to attempt ‘upon any Pretence whatsoever, either of Possession or Obsession, by Fasting and Prayer to cast out any Devil or Devils, under pain of the Imputation of Imposture or Cozenage, and Deposition from the Ministry’.32 However, Canon 72 had the unintended effect of increasing popular demand for Catholic clergy who could perform exorcisms. Priests had in their sacred arsenal objects and practices not available to their Protestant counterparts, a fact that would influence folk beliefs and boost the prestige of Catholic clergy for centuries to come.

31

  Ibid., p. 798   For the text of the Canon, see Thomas (1991), p. 579.

32

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Catholic Exorcisms through Protestant Eyes Ironically, it was internal events within the Church of England that first brought Catholic exorcism to prominence. Freeman has argued that Samuel Harsnett was never really interested in Catholic exorcisms; his real target in the Declaration was Darrell, and his introduction of a Catholic dimension to the anti-exorcism campaign was designed to win over the heir to the throne, King James VI of Scotland.33 If James came to see that puritans were as bad as papists, then Harsnett would be able to prevent the appearance of another Darrell figure. In March 1599, Richard Bancroft, then Bishop of London, began questioning a recusant woman named Friswood Williams about events that took place between the spring of 1585 and the summer of 1586.34 The fact that the events were so long ago did not matter for Harsnett and Bancroft’s polemical purpose. By 1585, William Weston (alias John Edmunds) was the Jesuit Superior in England and one of the last free Jesuits in the country. According to his own account, he became concerned by the number of Catholics and Protestants possessed by devils. Although ‘It was difficult to give the sufferers relief by means of exorcisms, because usually they let out violent and raucous shrieks during the ceremonies’,35 Weston determined to begin a campaign of exorcism in spite of the risk of discovery. Unfortunately, he did not produce a detailed account of subsequent events, which must be gleaned from Harsnett’s satirical exposé, published at the command of the Privy Council. Harsnett’s Declaration remained influential for well over a century and even informed Shakespeare’s portrayal of King Lear’s madness.36 Harsnett claimed that he based his description of Weston’s exorcisms on a book found in the possession of a recusant named Robert Barnes, ‘an English Treatise in a written hand … a holy fardell of holy relics, holy charms, and holy consecrated things, applied to the casting out of devils’.37 Barnes evidently realized that the book was important to the authorities when he wrote to Robert Cecil on 23 July 1598 pleading that he merely copied the ‘Miracle Book’ at the request of a friend and despised its contents himself. It is not clear exactly what the contents of the ‘Miracle Book’ were, since the original no longer survives, but it appears to have contained a diary of the possessions of one of the demoniacs, Sara 33

  Freeman (2000), pp. 58–9.   Brownlow (1993), p. 22. 35   Weston, W. (trans. P. Caraman), William Weston: The Autobiography of an 34

Elizabethan (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1955), p. 24. 36   For the influence of Harsnett’s book on King Lear, see Brownlow (1993), pp. 107–31. 37   Harsnett (1603), p. 1.

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Williams, written by the exorcist Anthony Tyrell, together with a narrative of the possessions of the gentleman Richard Mainy.38 A Latin essay on exorcism prefaced the book, supposedly by Weston himself. This would certainly be an intriguing text for the historian had it survived. In addition to the ‘Miracle Book’, Harsnett relied on the testimony of Tyrell himself, now turned informant. Tyrell had a penchant for exaggeration, claiming that Weston was responsible for five hundred conversions.39 Although the ‘Miracle Book’ almost certainly existed, the fact that Tyrell wrote much of it meant that he was in a good position to counterfeit the rest, in an effort to give the authorities what they wanted; it may not have been the book confiscated from Barnes. Harsnett personally interrogated Sara Williams for further evidence,40 and relied on testimony given to Bancroft by her sister Friswood. The Williams sisters were thus asked to recall in their early thirties events and details of events that took place in their teens.41 Weston’s exorcisms took place at Lord Vaux’s house at Hackney, Barnes’s house at Fulmer, a Mr Hughes’s house at Uxbridge, Sir George Peckham’s house at Denham in Buckinghamshire and the Earl of Lincoln’s in Cannon Row, London. Weston attempted to exorcize seven individuals, most of them servants. According to Harsnett, Weston was ‘big with the Guisian attempt’ (a reference to the doctrine of king-killing endorsed by the Guises in the French Wars of Religion) and determined ‘to advance the banner of Ignatius for ever here in England’.42 Weston’s supposed political motives were important to Harsnett’s case, since it drew attention to the closeness of the plotter Anthony Babington to the exorcisms; Nicholas Marwood, the first demoniac exorcized at Hackney, was Babington’s servant.43 In Theodor Harmsen’s view, ‘The government allowed the exorcisms to continue in the hope of implicating a wider circle of Catholics while waiting for the best moment to explode the manipulated plot and damage the reputation and organization of English Catholicism.’44 The government was certainly interested in those involved as sources of information on the whereabouts of priests long before Bancroft and Harsnett saw the propaganda value of the exorcisms.45 In June 1586, 38

Ibid., p. 22. Harmsen (2004), p. 314. Brownlow (1993), p. 12. For Brownlow (1993), p. 75, Friswood was ‘a government informer who must always be suspected of lying’. 42   Harsnett (1603), pp. 6–7. 43   Ibid., p. 11. 44   Harmsen (2004), p. 314. 45   Brownlow (1993), p. 28.     40   41   39

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Denham was finally raided, although according to Weston the priests were given time to escape because the pursuivants spent too long knocking at the door and were then confronted by one of the demoniacs (probably one of the Williams sisters), who told a pursuivant he had a thousand devils hanging on his coat button. Harsnett was right that the Jesuits saw exorcism as a ‘notable exploit’ and were keen to publicize it. When interrogated in prison, Weston proclaimed, ‘I was certain that there were many people who, given an opportunity of observing the power of the Church over evil spirits and monsters, would see and acknowledge at once the difference between the two religions and award the victory to the Catholic faith.’46 Weston’s statement seems irreconcilable with Brownlow’s assessment of the exorcisms as a purely internal Catholic event: ‘The exorcisms did not validate faith; faith, on the contrary, validated the exorcisms. The phenomena did not explain the faith; the faith explained the phenomena … they were entirely an event within the besieged world of Elizabethan Catholicism.’47 Brownlow justified his interpretation on the grounds that the authorities paid little attention to the exorcisms at first. However, this does not mean that exorcisms were not a developing part of Catholic missionary strategy that the authorities did not yet appreciate in the 1580s. Weston wished that the exorcisms could have been more public,48 and virtually all subsequent evidence of Catholic exorcisms displayed their missionary character. Indeed, it is obvious from these accounts that exorcisms were intended to confirm faith. Weston was assisted by twelve seminary priests: John Cornelius, the martyr Robert Dibdale,49 Christopher Thomson,50 Thomas Stemp or Stamp,51 Anthony Tyrell, Christopher Dryland,52 Christopher Tulice,53 Sherwood,54 Winkefield, Mud, Edward Dakins55 and John Ballard.56 Of these only one, Christopher Dryland, was actually a Jesuit. Two of these 46

Weston (1955), pp. 26–7. Brownlow (1993), p. 27. Weston (1955), p. 27. Ordained 1584 (Bellenger, p. 54). Ordained 1577 (ibid., p. 114). Ordained 1575 (ibid., p. 110). Ordained 1582 (ibid., p. 55). Called Thulys by Brown (1993), p. 24 and probably Christopher Thules, ordained 1584 (Bellenger, p. 115). 54   This could be John (ordained in 1583), Phillip (ordained 1570) or Richard Sherwood (ordained 1584) (Bellenger, p. 107). 55   Edward Dakins (b. 1554) (ibid., p. 53). 56   Ordained 1581 (ibid., p. 36). Brownlow thought Ballard a later addition by Tyrell. See Brownlow (1993), pp. 79–80 on the accuracy of the list of exorcists.     48   49   50   51   52   53   47

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priests, Winkefield and Mud, do not appear in any other sources and it is possible that they were laymen, Jesuit brothers, or inventions of Tyrell. The gathering of so many priests in one place presented a considerable danger to their personal safety, and it is possible that Weston considered it important that twelve priests should take part in order for the exorcisms to be effective; exorcism by twelve parsons was a recurring theme in later folklore. Dibdale’s involvement in the exorcisms was reported long after his death in a manuscript sent to the English College at Douai by an ‘ancient missioner’ named Davies. Davies noted that ‘out of one of the two maids [Ann Smith] he brought forth a great needle at her cheek, and two rusty nails, and pieces of lead.’ De Yepes noted that ‘The martyr Dibdale obliged the devil to bring up by the mouth of one of the possessed persons, balls of hair, and pieces of iron, and other such like things, which it was impossible could ever naturally have gone into, or afterwards have come out of, a human body.’ Furthermore, the devil was able to tell which relics of which saints had been brought by the priests ‘and obeyed the prayers and exorcisms of the church, confessing and declaring to their own confusion, the virtue which the sign of the cross, holy water, and relics … have against them’.57 Even before the martyrdom of the first seminary priests, Thomas Stapleton argued that the use of martyrs’ relics in exorcism was a confirmation of their holiness, ‘specially when the devils in mens bodies confesse that they are tormented of them, and desire them to spare them’.58 Although English Catholics may not have read De Yepes’s account, it confirms some of Harsnett’s account from a Catholic perspective and demonstrates that Weston’s exorcisms went on to play a role in the internal mythology of the Counter-Reformation as well as anti-Catholic discourse. Harsnett’s account confirmed ‘inquisitorial’ stereotypes of Catholics. Weston had the devils cry out and confirm the truth of the Catholic faith,59 and the methods used to expel the devils became increasingly violent. After a celebration of mass, Friswood was bound into a chair with towels before the exorcisms were read. When words alone failed, she was made to drink a ‘holy potion’ – a pint of sack, salad oil and other spices. Subsequently, her head was held over a bowl of burning brimstone until her face was black and a dosage of asafoetida was administered.60 Harsnett noted that the priests had access to Menghi’s Flagellum Daemonum (1578), and recipes of a similar nature were contained in Menghi’s Fuga Daemonum and 57

  De Yepes (1599), vol. 1, p. 97 (translated in Challoner (1803 [1741]), vol. 1, p. 102). 58   Stapleton in Bede (1565), p. 7v. On the use of martyrs’ relics in exorcisms, see Dillon (2002), p. 106. 59   Harsnett (1603), p. 113. 60   Ibid., p. 39. See also Ewen (1933), p. 109.

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Fustis Daemonum (1584).61 However, even Harsnett had to acknowledge that the exorcists did not follow Menghi’s prescriptions accurately, and his account masked divisions within Catholicism concerning the use of violence towards the possessed.62 Letters to Robert Cecil from Sir Richard Molyneux in Lancashire give an insight into the judicial measures taken to suppress exorcisms in outlying areas before Harsnett publicized the issue. Molyneux wrote to Cecil’s secretary Sir John Stanhope on 13 June 1598 concerning the activities of ‘some lewd priests’, who ‘had a certain woman, who pretended to be possessed with unclean spirits, upon whom they practised at some private places, where for the novelty thereof sometimes as many as five hundred persons would be drawn together, promising not to be betray them’. The mass appeal of these exorcisms is plausible, even if the idea that everyone present promised not to reveal what had occurred is not. Molyneux conceded that he had managed to capture only twenty people who confessed to having attended such gatherings and sent them for examination to the Bishop of Chester. On 3 August, Molyneux informed Cecil that he was closing in on the two priests involved and hoped to send them and the ‘demoniacs’ they pretended to cure to Chester for public punishment. Molyneux’s account suggests that demoniacs were as much an attraction for priests – an opportunity to test the church’s power – as priests were an attraction for demoniacs. George More claimed that Jane Ashton, one of the demoniacs exorcized by Darrell, went to live with a Catholic uncle in Lancashire, ‘where there resorted to her many Seminarie priestes, by whose coniurations and magical inchau[n] tments … the evil spirit was brought into her againe’.63 In Molyneux’s account, the demoniac became a kind of supernatural ‘road-show’, touring Lancashire in an effort to frighten people back into recusancy. He had no doubt that evangelization was the priests’ primary intention: ‘thus they daily win many unto them’.64 Richard Baddely’s Boy of Bilson (1622) was even more influential than Harsnett’s Declaration as an attempted ‘exposure’ of Catholic fraud in the practice of exorcism, and it was cited as late as 1718 by Francis Hutchinson as evidence of Catholic duplicity.65 According to Baddely, William Perry was whipped with a stole and a martyr’s thumb was thrust

61 62

  Harsnett (1603), p. 286. See also Brownlow (1993), n. p. 29.   On priestly violence, see Hartwell, A., A True Discourse upon the matter of

Martha Brossier of Romorantin, pretended to be possessed by a Divell (London, 1599); Thomas (1991), n. p. 583; Brownlow (1993), p. 63. 63   More (1600), p. 71. 64   Salisbury MSS, vol. 8, pp. 213–14, 293. 65   Hutchinson (1718), pp. 301–4.

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into his mouth.66 However, according to Wheeler, the exorcist whose own account prefaced Baddely’s commentary, three spirits were exorcized using prayers, holy water and holy oil, and the boy was made to pray for the woman who bewitched him.67 It was in the interests of Protestant authors to portray Catholic exorcisms as alien and radically different from Protestant practice, when in reality Protestant exorcists retained certain Catholic practices such as the use of the first verses of St John’s Gospel.68 Through Harsnett and Baddely’s efforts (although they drew on earlier sources including Erasmus and John Bale), the theme of fake exorcisms became a dominant one in anti-Catholic polemic. The last original antiCatholic exorcism account, Zacchary Taylor’s 15-page pamphlet The Devil Turn’d Casuist, appeared in 1696. This was a record of the exorcism of Thomas Ashton of Tunstead near Wigan, who was supposedly possessed after bewitchment by a wizard.69 On 27 January 1696, led by the ‘chief operator’, a Jesuit named Brooks, four priests attempted to exorcize Ashton at the house of Thomas Pennington in Orrel, Lancashire.70 It was a very public event and both Protestants and Catholics were present amongst the spectators. Brooks brought the demoniac to the altar and put his stole around his neck,71 at which the demoniac accused him of trying to strangle him. Eventually, by the use of holy water, the devil was compelled to speak and confessed that he had come to bring despair.72 The priests proceeded to question the devil about Catholic doctrine, which gave rise to the pamphlet’s title, and significantly Protestants were sent for whom the priests thought might be encouraged to convert by witnessing the exorcism.73 The priests proceeded to command the demoniac in Latin to stick out his tongue, but the exorcism deteriorated into farce when the ‘demoniac’ forgot his instructions and, when asked to turn his head, stuck out his tongue again.

66

Baddely (1622), pp. 66–7. Ibid., p. 50. Cambers (2009), pp. 28–9. Taylor (1696), p. 2. Brooks was probably Robert Brooke SJ (1663–1714) (Bellenger, p. 43). Two of the other priests were named as Skinner and Kennel; these were probably John Skinner SJ (1662–1708) (ibid., p. 108) and the secular John Baines alias Kendall (1653–1727) (ibid., p. 35). 71   The placing of part of the stole on the neck of the possessed was part of the Rite of Exorcism of 1614, but seems to have been misinterpreted as a violent act by Protestant authors. See Rituale Romanum (Rome: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004 [1614]), p. 203. 72   Taylor (1696), p. 2. 73   Ibid., pp. 7–8.     68   69   70   67

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The accusation of priestly violence and the insinuation of magic recurred in Taylor’s account; Ashton was force-fed five spoonfuls of holy water and a crucifix was applied, ‘which they often made use of, and seemed sometimes to make characters, or write something with it on his forehead’.74 The missionary intent of Brooks and the other priests was quite open; according to Taylor, the entire charade was a means of reclaiming their flock after several had conformed to the Church of England,75 and at the end of the exorcism ‘Mr. Brooks by way of Epilogue, made another harangue unto the people, the substance of which was to signify his hopes, that that days work would be a means to the Conversion of many then present, and save their Souls.’76 Exorcism and the Catholic Mission Except in the case of the ‘Boy of Bilson’, few Catholic accounts of exorcisms survive that directly rebutted the accusations of violence and fraud made by Protestant authors in specific cases. However, there is no shortage of separate Catholic accounts, most notably in the Annual Letters of the Vice Province of England, and later the Annual Letters of the Jesuit missionary Colleges, which demonstrate that the English Jesuits saw their exorcisms as an important missionary endeavour. These Jesuit sources should not be taken at face value; Walsham has cautioned that the Annual Letters tended to be ‘tainted by a militant, triumphalist tone’, and it was natural enough that reports to superiors in Rome should be upbeat.77 De Yepes included numerous accounts of missionary exorcisms in his Historia Particular, although he rarely gave details of specific individuals. However, De Yepes’s selection of examples implied that anything less than out-andout recusancy endangered a Catholic’s soul. A young man from Derbyshire became possessed by an evil spirit after receiving communion in his parish church in order to save his estate;78 another young man in Hampshire in 1594 only needed to visit a Protestant church for the same thing to happen, and he was only delivered when an imprisoned priest gave him the cassock of a martyred priest for protection.79

74

    76   77   78   79   75

Ibid., pp. 9–10. Ibid., p. 1. Ibid., p. 14. Walsham (2003), p. 782. De Yepes (1599), vol. 1, pp. 98–9. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 100–102; Challoner (1803 [1741]), vol. 1, pp. 102–3.

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The secular priest John Cornelius, who was a missionary in England from 1584 until his martyrdom in 1594, was particularly famous as an exorcist.80 Although he was apparently one of Weston’s team of exorcists, Catholic accounts do not portray him as practising the ‘hands on’ style of exorcism described by Harsnett. He once exorcized a particularly intractable spirit by praying ‘that he might rather himself be blotted out of the book of life, than that God’s glory, and the power of the Church or of the Catholic religion should suffer in the opinion of the bystanders’.81 The spirit declared that the priest’s charity was irresistible, and was cast out by prayer alone. Nevertheless, Cornelius does not seem to have been averse to using his powers as an exorcist for the purposes of Catholic propaganda; on one occasion, he forced the devil to confess Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist, presumably during a mass at which a demoniac and nonCatholics were present.82 A similar experiment involving the Eucharist was attempted by a Jesuit in Norfolk in 1643; he tested the devil’s power by bringing the sacrament to the bedside of a possessed person. He required the devil to indicate his presence, which elicited a rasping voice from the sufferer. The priest then asked for a confession of faith from the demoniac and administered the sacrament.83 It is not clear whether non-Catholics were present on this occasion or not, but if they were it would explain the priest’s actions. Protestant reliance on Catholics was an important element in Catholic propaganda; again and again, the protagonists in Catholic exorcism narratives were heretics forced to acknowledge the power of the Catholic church, such as the ‘Calvinists’ who brought the possessed to Jesuits for exorcism in 1619.84 A typical story from 1676/7 illustrates the way in which Jesuits used the ‘water of St Ignatius’:85 The daughter of a certain Anabaptist had been for two years a violent lunatic: she uttered loud cries and howlings, neither would she eat or drink for weeks together. Many medical men were called in, but in vain. At length the wretched condition of this young woman came to the ears of a Catholic woman, who sent her some holy water, having taken which she was at first seized with a paroxysm of madness, but after a second and third time began to recover, and at length was delivered to her parents in perfect health.

80

    82   83   84   85   81

Foley, vol. 3, p. 445. Ibid., vol. 3, p. 446. Ibid., vol. 3, p. 446. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 571. Ibid., vol. 5, p. 993. Ibid., vol. 4, p. 448.

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The water of St Ignatius was blessed in the name of the saint, or by immersing a relic or even a book by St Ignatius. In Kent in 1637, a Jesuit priest told a noble young lady troubled by nocturnal spirits to sprinkle her bed with the water.86 Holy water, of which the water of St Ignatius was a variant, was part of the official Rite of Exorcism of 1614, which recommended that it be thrown at apparitions of demons.87 An advantage of holy water was that it could be dispensed by the laity for use when no priest was available; it could even be given to Protestants. Another reason for the popularity of the ‘holy water of St Ignatius’ among Jesuits was, of course, that it served to promote the Jesuit cause. Similar claims were made for images of the saint. In 1655, on the advice of a Jesuit, an image of St Ignatius was used to exorcize a locked dairy where blood spots had appeared in milk.88 The Feast of St Ignatius on 31 July was promoted by the Jesuits as especially effective for exorcisms. On one occasion, at the entreaty of a family friend, a Jesuit visited a girl who was assumed to be possessed, since she seemed to be close to death twice a day but always recovered. The priest instructed her in the principles of the Catholic faith and gave her water blessed by a relic of St Ignatius. In Latin (so as to ensure that he was speaking to the spirit and not the girl), he ordered the devil to come to the chapel, creeping on hands and feet to the altar, and to confess that he could not resist exorcism. Also in Latin, he ordered the devil to indicate in a missal on which day in July he would be forced to leave the child’s body – the child indicated the introit for the Feast of St Ignatius.89 The Rituale Romanum recommended that the relics of a saint be clasped to the breast as part of the rite of exorcism,90 and there were some instances of this in England. In 1647, it was reported that relics of the martyr Henry Morse were being used to deliver people from evil spirits. In this way, exorcism could serve as one manifestation of the burgeoning cult of a martyr and provide a mechanism for furnishing further evidence of sanctity.91 In addition to the ‘water of St Ignatius’ and other sacramentals, Jesuits made use of the sacrament of penance and confessions of faith to drive away demons. This practice was closely linked with the conviction that heresy and the devil went hand-in-hand; heresy made people vulnerable to the devil’s attacks, and freeing them from heresy freed them from demonic interference. In 1626, a London woman was freed from possession by

86

    88   89   90   91   87

Ibid., vol. 7:2, p. 1141. Rituale Romanum, p. 201. Foley, vol. 2, p. 22. Ibid., pp. 20–21. Rituale Romanum, p. 199. Foley, vol. 7:2, p. 1200.

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confession to a Jesuit priest,92 although a Jesuit in Suffolk in 1636 was less successful when he was attacked by the spirit he was attempting to exorcize through confession.93 Exorcism was ‘a potent metaphor of and a practical metaphor for the expulsion of heresy’.94 In a particularly bizarre episode, a girl, whose father did not want her to be a Catholic, made a pact with the devil so that she would be possessed, in the hope that her father would be forced to call in a Catholic priest. A priest was called and, after making a profession of faith, the girl was exorcized. Her father then forced her to recant, and she was possessed for a second time. Eventually, her father relented and permitted her to practise her faith freely.95 The use of penance and a confession of faith for the purposes of exorcism presupposed that the sufferer was capable of rational engagement with the priest, and this assumption may have reflected changing views of possession and exorcism. The Annual Letter of 1619 described those exorcized as ‘sufferers from delusions and visitations of the devil’.96 Exorcism was not just for those physically possessed by the devil, and many of the possessed merely believed themselves to have been cursed by a witch with physical or mental illness. People were freed from the devil’s influence rather than delivered from full-scale possession. Other adaptations of exorcism to prevailing beliefs are evident from the Jesuit sources, such as the use of exorcism on the suicidal; it was a popular belief in the seventeenth century that no one would attempt to destroy themselves unless under the devil’s influence. In 1604, Jesuits exorcized a non-Catholic man who was contemplating suicide,97 and in 1640, a Jesuit in County Durham remonstrated with a man with a speech impediment who was attempting to throw himself into a river. After confession and communion, the man was freed from the spirit and his speech began to return.98 Exorcism of the suicidal was a reflection of the view, found in both Protestant and Catholic authors, that possession could be seen as an extreme form of temptation, in which the devil might implant thoughts and desires in a person’s mind without their consent (‘obsession’ rather than ‘possession’).99 Deliverance of the suicidal had a special significance in Catholic mission, given the temptations to despair that sometimes afflicted Protestants who adopted a firmly predestinarian view of salvation. Oldridge has 92

    94   95   96   97   98   99   93

Ibid., p. 1121. Ibid., pp. 1137–8. Walsham (2003), p. 802. Foley, vol. 2, p. 21. Ibid., vol. 5, p. 993. Ibid., vol. 7:1, p. xxvi. Ibid., vol. 7:2, p. 1145. Oldridge (2010), p. 25.

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demonstrated that the devil as ‘accuser’ became especially associated with suicide in the seventeenth century.100 De Yepes claimed that John Foxe was driven mad by ‘a temptation of despair, from the great sense he had of his own sins and of God’s justice’. A student at Oxford was ‘strangely obsessed by the devil’, who tried to persuade him to kill himself, and was only cured when a Catholic priest convinced him of his theological errors and administered the sacrament of confession. However, when the student returned to Oxford and attended chapel in order to avoid ejection from the university, the devil returned to tempt him and he hanged himself.101 For the Catholic author Oliver Almond, the fearsome Calvinist God who tempted Protestants to despair of salvation was none other than the devil himself.102 To be delivered from heresy was also, ipso facto, to be delivered from such temptations. The Jesuits and seculars were not the only clergy involved in exorcisms in the seventeenth century. The Benedictine martyr Edward Ambrose Barlow (1585–1641) was sometimes called upon to perform exorcisms in Lancashire; his brother Rudesind Barlow recounted one incident when Ambrose was called to free a man from possession. Ambrose correctly ascertained that, rather than being possessed, the man was actually obsessed with an enchantment that caused him to believe he had found treasure:103 Our Martyr conceiving that it might be he was not possest, but obsest with the spirit of covetousnesse; and therefore he examined him whether he had no hid some treasure, to which (as I thinke) the man answered, that he had hid a lumpe or wedge of gold (which he had found in his garden) in a meale-chest: which our Martyr with his leave went to seeke for, and there in lieu thereof he found a thing in shape most like a toad, having down upon the backe like to a gosling, and then calling for the tongs he tooke it therein, and cast it into the fire.

Dominicans were also involved in exorcisms. On a visit to Northumberland in September 1708, the Dominican Thomas Worthington was informed by Thomas Gibson of Corbridge that ‘Robert Armstrong, alias Roberts, a strenuous labourer, brought over many families to Catholicism, [and] made war with success against the spirits of evil, so signally that his fame and sanctity are spoken of even to this day.’104 Armstrong died in 1663, so this folk-memory had lasted for 45 years when Worthington recorded it. 100

Ibid., p. 70; Johnstone (2006), p. 17. De Yepes (1599), vol. 1, pp. 103–4; Challoner (1803 [1741]), vol. 1, p. 103. Almond (1623), p. 71. Barlow, R. (ed. W.E. Rhodes), ‘The Apostolical Life of Ambrose Barlow, O. S. B.’, Downside Review 44 (1926), pp. 235–52, at p. 242. 104   Bracey, R. (ed.), Dominicana (London: CRS, 1925), p. 109.     102   103   101

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The last exorcism recorded in the Jesuit Annual Letters took place in 1676 or 1677, at around the same time as the Carmelite Bede Travers was involved in exorcisms. The Orrel exorcism of 1696 was not reported by any Catholic source. There are a variety of possible reasons why exorcisms were no longer reported by the Jesuits after the 1670s; the last case in the Annual Letters concerned the daughter of an Anabaptist exorcized by a laywoman by the use of holy water,105 but the girl was described as a ‘lunatic’ and the Jesuits may have interpreted the exorcism as the cure of a mental illness by the application of holy water, which was used not just for possessions but for curing natural illness as well. The ambiguity in exorcism narratives of this kind was deliberate, and priests were increasingly unwilling to commit themselves to one interpretation of the effectiveness of exorcism. Bede Travers was particularly reluctant to acknowledge the reality of alleged possessions, attributing the ‘possession’ of a Catholic woman with a Protestant husband to ‘delusion’.106 He concluded that ‘It should be noticed that cases of real diabolical possession are exceedingly rare in this country. In the course of nineteen years I have never come across a single one.’107 Zachary Taylor’s reaction to the Orrel exorcism may also help to explain why exorcisms were no longer reported by Catholics after the 1670s. In contrast to Harsnett, who gloated over the capture and torture of priests, almost a hundred years later Taylor saw the exorcists as pitiful figures: ‘We are bound to pity, and pray for them that are Guided (I ought to have said misguided) by such wilfully blindfolded Guides.’108 Although Taylor reported the demoniac to the Justices of the Peace at the Wigan Quarter Sessions, he had no desire to persecute the priests and was amused when they fled the area in fear. By 1696, exorcism no longer had the power to appeal to the intellectual elite as a compelling reason for conversion. Taylor’s account shows that exorcisms continued in rural areas, but reporting them was no longer considered an effective form of evangelism by the Catholic clergy. Hans de Waardt has argued that, in the Dutch Netherlands, the two factors that led to the decline of exorcism among the secular clergy after around 1650 were the rise of Jansenism and the stabilization of confessional boundaries.109 Dutch Jansenists themselves believed that the dispute between the Vicars Apostolic of Utrecht and the Jesuits was analogous to the situation that obtained in England.110 Whilst the rivalry between the 105

    107   108   109   110   106

Foley, vol. 4, p. 448. Zimmerman (1899), p. 258. Ibid., p. 260. Taylor (1696), p. 15. De Waardt (2009), pp. 349–50. See Clark (1932), pp. 164–5.

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seculars and regulars in England never led to formal schism as it did in the Netherlands, the supernatural played a similar (if less prominent) role in the internal politics of the English church. There is no evidence to suggest that English Jesuits deliberately performed exorcisms in order to confute the counter-claims of Jansenist secular priests (as they did in the Netherlands), but De Waardt’s observations concerning confessional stabilization may well hold true for English regions with a large Catholic population, such as Lancashire. By the late seventeenth century, denominational coexistence had made it unlikely that anyone would cross the confessional divide in the Netherlands, and consequently exorcism lost its propaganda value. Religious tolerance in England was more limited than that which existed across the German Ocean. Furthermore, there were political incentives to convert to Catholicism in the reign of James II, and financial and political incentives to convert to Protestantism thereafter. Nevertheless, as Glickman has demonstrated, defections from Catholicism were largely confined to the aristocracy, and tenacity in the faith characterized the recusant baronets and lesser landowners.111 As the fire of the Reformation cooled and the likelihood of mass conversions diminished, exorcism lost a major part of its raison d’être and the reporting of exorcisms could result in ridicule rather than positive publicity. ‘The Devil in the Convent’: Exorcism in Religious Communities Accounts of exorcisms in English religious houses on the Continent are rare, but the convent annals of the Discalced Carmelite monastery at Lierre contain one of the most vivid and unusual exorcism narratives of the Counter-Reformation. Nicky Hallett has recently edited several accounts of the exorcisms of two sisters, Margaret and Elizabeth Mostyn, by the convent chaplain Edmund Bedingfield in 1651. ‘Convent possession’ was arguably a distinctive phenomenon of the early modern religious world, with well-publicized and tragic examples at Louvain, Loudun and Aix-en-Provence. In all of these cases, suspicion of witchcraft fell on someone associated with the convent, whether a nun or a confessor, who was subsequently tried and executed.112 No such dramatic consequences followed the Lierre exorcisms, but this did not render the exorcisms themselves any less extraordinary. The intense focus on interior spirituality in a Carmelite convent, in addition to the practice of keeping spiritual diaries and the tradition of spiritual biography, contributed to the unusually detailed character 111

  Glickman (2009), pp. 59–60.   Hallett (2007b), pp. 17–18.

112

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of the Lierre accounts. The most important of these, written by Edmund Bedingfield himself (albeit some of it was taken down as the sisters’ own words), was kept under lock and key until after Elizabeth Mostyn’s death in 1700. Nevertheless, the memory of the exorcisms survived in the convent without the precise details being known; other accounts of the lives of the Mostyn sisters alluded to the events. However, when the Bishop of Antwerp became aware of the exorcisms Bedingfield explicitly requested that ‘in no way should the acts of exorcism of the said nuns become known to their compatriots, to avoid great damage to their friends and parents.’113 There are a variety of reasons for Bedingfield’s reluctance to share the exorcisms with the English Catholic community. Had the story been widely publicized in England, and the identities of the nuns revealed, the Mostyn family could have suffered penalties for sending their daughters abroad. Alternatively, the exorcism could have brought scandal on the Mostyns amongst other Catholics or Protestant relatives. A further possibility is that Protestant pamphleteers could have seized on and distorted the facts. However, the fact that the Lierre exorcisms remained unknown to English Catholics probably had important consequences for the history of the Catholic community’s response to the supernatural. By the time the story was released in the eighteenth century, it was of little interest to anyone outside the convent, but it seems highly likely that the release of the story would have divided the Catholic community in the 1650s and forced Catholics either to defend or to retreat from the exalted Mariology and eccentric demonology of the Lierre community and its confessor. Perhaps the most unusual feature of all in the Lierre exorcisms was the casting out of 300 named devils (actually 298) from the Mostyn sisters, each one of which was compelled by the exorcist to reveal its name and function.114 Johnstone has noted that, in contrast to Continental Protestant demonologists such as Johann Weyer, English Protestant theologians did not attempt to name individual demons or concentrate on the powers of specific devils.115 This was equally true of Catholics; the Lierre exorcisms are the only example of named demons being cast out by English priests. Edmund Bedingfield acknowledged that it was ‘a thing scarcely ever heard of before’ for every devil to reveal its name, but argued that this demonstrated the importance of obedience to the confessor ‘in every little thing’.116 However, Margaret Mostyn went beyond just naming the devils; she was able to identify their original status in the celestial hierarchy and

113

    115   116   114

Ibid., p. 84. For the list of devils, see Hallett (2007b), pp. 92–106. Johnstone (2006), p. 31. Hallett (2007b), pp. 79–80.

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foretell their future activity in the world.117 This on its own made the exorcism narrative controversial enough to remain under lock and key. None of the demons cast out of Margaret and Elizabeth Mostyn are recognizable from Biblical or apocryphal literature, and only two seem to have been derived from a basic knowledge of Classical literature: Tarquin the demon of pride (number 3, after the Roman king Tarquinius Superbus) and ‘Herculus’ (number 34) who encouraged self-satisfaction. Some of the demons had more imaginative names than others; ‘Sulfar’ (number 35) was a demon who tempted them ‘to delight in foul odours’; ‘Strangferus’ (number 270) tempted the nuns to hang themselves and ‘Wisherus’ and ‘Hopicus’ (numbers 271 and 273) tempted the sisters ‘to hope no remedy appears to help us’ and that the confessor would never understand them. ‘Disasterus’ (number 294) tempted the sisters to think ‘that we are the ruin of the whole monastery’. Certain patterns emerge in the list of demons that suggest the nuns were responding to the exorcist’s demands extempore, although whether consciously or subconsciously it is not for the historian to speculate. The names of some demons seem to have been created by altering one or two letters each time in a similar name, such as Slacur (number 44), Slecur (number 114), Slacus (number 187) and Slascus (number 211). On one occasion a name was duplicated: ‘Discus’ (numbers 103 and 133) appeared with two different functions. The names of the demons began as personifications of vices such as falsehood, pride, disobedience and vanity, but subsequently became demons with specific tasks such as Octus and Alchmus (numbers 72 and 78), charged with hindering devotion to the Virgin Mary and the Guardian Angels respectively, or very specific temptations: ‘to look with curiosity on shameful things’ (Icus, number 58), ‘to lie out of pride’ (Percus, number 65). Later still in the list the demons became externalizations of specific unacceptable thoughts, such ‘Perflus’ (number 143) who tempted the sisters to believe ‘that the Confessor is an inexperienced young man who believes in phantasmata etc.’ – a particularly ironic temptation that perhaps reveals something of the sisters’ true thoughts concerning Bedingfield. Bedingfield portrayed the possession of the nuns as the result of the witchcraft of a jilted lover, which the devil chose to make effective out of jealousy that the Virgin Mary was showing special favour to the women.118 The possession of the nuns was thus an integral part of their spiritual autobiography and an episode that heightened their holiness. In the Lierre exorcism, the Virgin Mary effectively played the role usually reserved for Christ as Satan’s divine antagonist; indeed, Christ did not appear at 117

  Ibid., p. 83.   Ibid., p. 58.

118

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all except as a form taken by the devil. This reflected the Mariological preoccupations of the Lierre convent; while she was possessed, Margaret Mostyn was critical of the Antwerp Carmelites, who ‘would all be Madeleines and go immediately to our Saviour without making use of our Blessed Lady & other saints’.119 This view of Mary’s role as mediatrix was by no means uncontroversial in Counter-Reformation theology, and it is possible that one of the conflicts that was playing out beneath the surface of the Lierre exorcism-drama concerned Mary’s centrality to Carmelite spirituality. By forcing the community to acknowledge the reality of her possession, Margaret forced other nuns to acknowledge the appropriateness of the Virgin Mary’s involvement as the devil’s direct antagonist. As demoniacs, the sisters enjoyed licence to denounce their superiors and interpret authoritatively the implementation of the Teresian reform in the English Carmelite convents. Elizabeth Mostyn was the first to be afflicted in the autumn of 1650, with the devil mocking her in the form of the crucified Christ and attempting to convince her of her own damnation.120 Over time, visions and mental temptations advanced to physical attacks by the devil, who dashed Elizabeth’s crucifix out of her hand, lifted her out of bed, and pulled off the sisters’ bedclothes. The devil appeared as Christ crucified, as the Virgin Mary, as St Teresa, or as their Guardian Angel, and told them to kill themselves as this was the only way to expiate their sins.121 Subsequently, he appeared in the form of other nuns and finally in the form of the Mostyn sisters themselves, promising that their ‘doubles’ would fulfil all their duties in the convent. However, the devil ‘would commit uncivil acts with those representations & persuade them that they were as guilty of the sins as if they themselves had done it’. This last diabolical deception seems to have distressed the sisters more than anything else. The nature of the ‘possession’ of the Mostyn sisters demonstrates that the boundary between temptation, obsession and possession was a very fluid one indeed. The visions and experiences of the sisters could be interpreted as outward manifestations of internal temptations, as physical attacks by the devil, or as outward manifestations of interior possession. The nuns’ experiences existed on a continuum of spiritual conflict ranging from mental temptation to full-blown bodily possession. One reason Bedingfield did not immediately make use of the rite of exorcism may have been the ambiguity of the distinction between temptation and possession within the intense environment of a Carmelite convent. Bedingfield said nine masses and asked the Virgin Mary ‘how to comply with our Lady’s 119

  Ibid., p. 77.   Ibid., pp. 59–60. 121   Ibid., pp. 62–3. 120

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best will in this important affair’. He was ‘daily put on more & more, with a greater confidence, to read the prayers [of exorcism]’. Exorcism was by no means an automatic step, and the sisters suffered for six months before it was used. At last, on the Feast of the Annunciation, 25 March 1651, Bedingfield read the prayers of exorcism over Margaret and Elizabeth Mostyn from the ‘outward speakhouse’ (where visitors could communicate with the nuns through a grille) as he would not normally have entered the nuns’ enclosure. Consequently, the Prioress had to be present to supervise the nuns: Before the litanies were finished the whole place was filled with cries & lamentations, & [they] would have run away, but the stole over their necks kept them so fast, though it did but touch them, that they found it impossible to move from the place … As the Exorcism advanced so their torments & outcries increased until the end.

The exorcism went on for four or five hours, and by the end of it Bedingfield had successfully cast out Baltas, the devil of impurity, from Elizabeth’s body, although he remained in Margaret. Bedingfield noted the contractions, convulsions and coldness in the nuns’ bodies, and that they seemed heavier after the exorcism. Margaret imagined that she was choking on black flies that came out of her mouth and developed ‘coalblack spots on her hands and arms’ that came and went according to where Bedingfield made the sign of the cross. After a second exorcism, the sisters appeared to return to normal and ‘were extremely tempted to believe, that all … were but fancies, & that the devil had nothing to do with them’.122 The violent temptations returned, however, and on 16 April, Bedingfield read the prayers of exorcism again: ‘During this, they suffered most grievous convulsions in all their limbs, with dreadful frights, seeing the devils flying up & down for at least two hours.’ Bedingfield and the Prioress both heard ‘a noise near to Sister Margaret, somewhat like the wailing of a cat’. This time Bedingfield was in the same room as the nuns and he remained with them for the rest of the night. Bedingfield commanded the devil to depart ‘in a flash of lightning’ and saw a flash of fire on Margaret’s bed. However, the confessor was losing confidence in his own ability as an exorcist: I began to lose courage completely, and resolved not to risk on my own head saying these prayers, since they caused such ill effects. I went, thus afflicted, to our Blessed Lady of the Cluse and offered them wholly to her sacred protection … for I saw plainly that I could effect nothing. On this I resolved to meddle no more with them by way of prayers until such time that I should 122

  Ibid., pp. 65–8.

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perceive that our Blessed Lady gave me more assurances of effecting what I intended.

In spite of his doubts, the sisters’ desire for relief led him to read the prayers again on 18 April, when the demoniacs ‘were so furious & enraged that we were forced to bind their hands at the beginning of the Conjuration’. The sisters’ rage at the Blessed Sacrament, which Bedingfield exposed to them, was unambiguous evidence that the devil was in control of their minds and bodies. The next day, Margaret was questioned on the number of devils possessing her. At first, she claimed to be possessed by three, then she remembered ‘the manner in which she had been bewitched’ before she entered the convent and the names of the first four devils who came to her. The sisters were exorcized again that evening and again the next morning (19 April) after mass, when Margaret declared that she and her sister were possessed by three hundred devils and that a hundred of them had been cast out so far. On 22 April, a further sixty devils were cast out and Bedingfield noted the grossly physical nature of the possession: ‘the devils began to be so exterior that they could only imagine that they had fleas hopping up & down, whereas before they seemed to be in their very bones.’ The devils, in other words, were loosening their hold on the women’s bodies. Vochiel, ‘the devil of the stomach & of witchcraft’, who made Margaret vomit and caused her sister painful menstruation, proved to be the hardest devil to cast out, requiring nine masses in honour of the Virgin Mary, nine masses in honour of St Anastasius, and nine days of fasting, communion prayers and almsgiving by the community.123 Over the following days, the rest of the devils were cast out; on one occasion Bedingfield made use of a relic of Henry Morse, the Jesuit martyr. Between 20 and 24 April, Bedingfield spent two hours, twice a day, questioning the sisters and noting down the names and functions of the 298 devils, during which times ‘there suddenly always arose turbulent & blustering winds, more or less according to the devil that rendered his name.’ On 25 April, Bedingfield decided to let the Bishop of Antwerp know what had been going on, but that afternoon the sisters went into convulsions again caused by Vochiel, whom the sisters mistakenly believed had been cast out. In order to prove them wrong, the exorcist commanded Vochiel to enter Margaret’s little finger and Elizabeth’s wrist, where black spots appeared to demonstrate the devil’s presence. The exorcisms were finally completed on 6 May, when Margaret’s convulsions were more violent than ever. Bedingfield commanded her to stand up and walk: ‘The words were no sooner out of my mouth but she suddenly started up & walked as well as any of us present, having no more need of my crosses.’ Margaret declared 123

  Ibid., pp. 71–3.

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that the Virgin Mary was responsible and said that ‘Ave Maria’ should be written on the door of every nun’s cell as an act of thanksgiving.124 Following her exorcism, Margaret was regarded as a channel for the Virgin Mary’s wishes, and her every instruction was adhered to regarding proper thanksgiving for the miracle of the sisters’ deliverance and publicizing the successful exorcism. She commanded Bedingfield to visit the Bishop and give him an account of what had happened, asking him and three other witnesses to examine and confirm the veracity of the case. Furthermore, the Bishop ‘must divulge it to have happened in his Diocese’ by ordering a procession of Our Lady of the Cluse, who should be regarded as especially effective for exorcism. The Bishop should also commission ‘a table or votive of plate on black velvet in which is to be our Lady of Cluse treading the devil under her and holding him in chains with one hand’, which should bear an inscription identifying the sisters only as ‘M. J.’ and ‘U. O. S.’. Two silver candlesticks should be given to the shrine by the community. Furthermore, although accounts of the miracle could be written in Latin and other languages, ‘in English it will not come so soon’, and for this reason Bedingfield’s account should be kept in a sealed chest until after the death of the last of the sisters.125 Bedingfield prepared a defence of the exorcisms for the Bishop’s benefit, setting out to prove ‘that the sisters’ favours are more than fancies’, ‘[that] the devil has & does tempt the two sisters’, ‘that the favours done to these two sisters come from heaven & our Blessed Lady’, ‘that they were genuinely possessed’, ‘that their characters were such that their great hope of liberation from the devils was evident’, and that the sisters ‘were completely liberated’. Bedingfield proceeded in Scholastic fashion, acknowledging doubts and counter-arguments and dealing with them along the way.126 The fact that Bedingfield felt moved to defend the reality of the possessions, along with his initial reluctance to make use of the rite of exorcism at all, is an indication that his proceedings were far from uncontroversial and that there were clergy in the diocese of Antwerp prepared to take issue with his approach. The Lierre exorcism was unique among English exorcisms, not only because it was recorded in such detail, but also because it gave a special place to the Virgin Mary, named individual demons, and involved a challenge to religious authority. In these three respects, the Lierre exorcism was very un-English. No other English exorcist stressed Mary’s intercession, albeit some Jesuit exorcists emphasized the power of St Ignatius, and the Lierre Carmelites seem to have been deeply influenced by the proximity of the 124

  Ibid., pp. 75–6.   Ibid., pp. 78–9. 126   For Bedingfield’s defence of the reality of the exorcism, see ibid., pp. 85–92. 125

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local shrine of Our Lady of the Cluse. Furthermore, the exorcism’s selfcontained convent setting allowed it to become a drama of dissent in which the demoniacs were given licence to criticize their religious superiors. The claustrophobic world of a convent of nuns was the perfect environment for the interpretation of opposition and dissent as possession. The male religious houses and colleges were directly connected to the English mission through an ongoing two-way transfer of personnel, and there was a greater potential for the expulsion and punishment of those who defied their superiors. Abbots had the power to imprison members of their community who defied them, such as Abbot Maurus Heatley of Lambspring who kept Maurus Chaplin in prison for nine years (1788–97) for assaulting the Abbot with a cricket bat and slashing his portrait.127 Within the English Benedictine monasteries, dissent was sometimes interpreted as madness but never as possession. In the seventeenth century, mad monks tended to remain in the care of their monasteries such as Dunstan Porter (d. 1706), who went mad not long before his ordination and never recovered.128 Richard Yoward was ‘deranged’ for 16 years before he died at La Celle in 1694.129 George Whall, although he was sent for treatment to the hospital of St Lazare in Paris after he went mad in 1687, eventually returned to his monastery and lived out his days in the community.130 Later, however, Benedictine communities seem to have treated mad monks more harshly, such as Heatley’s treatment of Chaplin. Another monk, Robert Copsey, was imprisoned for insanity outside his convent from 1736–90.131 In several of these cases, the monks’ madness manifested itself in the form of an excess of scruples, a temptation that Bedingfield and the Mostyn sisters would not have hesitated to consider evidence of possession. It is unlikely that male religious, such as the circumspect Bede Travers and the English Benedictines, were inherently more rationalistic than their female counterparts. However, they were less tolerant of ‘enthusiasm’ in spirituality. The Benedictine Ambrose Ferraud (1786–1847), ‘a visionary and nearly beside himself’, was derided by the President of his Congregation for his hare-brained scheme to lead a procession from city to city, converting Europe.132 However, this did not necessarily mean that the President cast doubt on Ferraud’s sanctity and good intentions. As members of a missionary congregation, the English Benedictines had considerable freedom of movement and, consequently, freedom to cause 127

    129   130   131   132   128

Scott (1992), p. 27 Allanson (1999), p. 121. Ibid., p. 110. Ibid., p. 123. Ibid., p. 216. Ibid., pp. 384–5.

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trouble, and an ‘enthusiast’ or a madman endangered the Congregation’s reputation in practical rather than spiritual terms. In an enclosed convent of nuns, by contrast, the interpretation of dissent as possession served both the dissenters, who were thereby given a licence to criticize, and the community, which externalized dissent as the effect of demonic influence whilst regarding the demoniacs as holy sufferers. Catholic Exorcisms of Haunted Houses There has never been an official Catholic rite for the exorcism of buildings, and the exorcism in the Rituale Romanum was reserved exclusively for possessed persons. Nevertheless, attempts were made to supplement the deficiency, such as by the German Jesuit Peter Thyraeus in his Locis Infestis (1604). Thyraeus’ rite consisted of five components: the invocation of God, the Virgin Mary and all the saints, the recitation of the gradual psalms, the reading of a portion of St John’s Gospel, the censing of the haunted place, and the conclusion.133 An edition of the Rituale Romanum published at Madrid in 1631 included a rite entitled Exorcismus domus a daemonio vexatae that received at least local episcopal approval.134 Priests in England compensated in their own ways for the lack of an official rite. In 1656, a Mr Hall of Halfcote in Worcestershire invited Protestant clergy to exorcize his house, without success. The outcome was more satisfactory when he got in touch with William Atkins, Rector of the Jesuit College of St Aloysius: ‘At daybreak, [Atkins] purified the entire house, according to the solemn rite of the Church, with wax tapers, holy water, and blessed palms, or olive branches.’135 It seems that Atkins was also the priest involved in the attempted exorcism of Charles Coleman’s house in Cannock in February 1658; he was certainly the author of an account of it. The priest was first called in when Anne Cherington saw ‘a most horrible monster’ during a haunting in which the spirit of John Coleman, her master’s father, was trying to attract her attention. According to Atkins, ‘in all the rooms [the priest] reads the exorcisms of the Church, makes a procession about the house with the Blessed Sacrament and, where he hears the knocking, commands the spirit to speak or show 133

  Thyraeus, P., ‘Benedictio domus novae aut daemonibus infestae’, in Daemoniaci cum Locis Infestis et Terriculamentis Nocturnis (Cologne, 1604), pp. 242–54. 134   A translation of this rite may be found in Thurston, H., ‘Appendix: The Exorcism of Haunted Houses’, in Ghosts and Poltergeists (London: Burns and Oates, 1953), pp. 204–8. 135   Foley, vol. 2, pp. 22–3.

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himself.’ The priest soon realized that the spirit was interested only in Anne, and instructed her to spend three days in prayer and receive communion daily. On the third day, after mass, ‘there came a very hideous knocking; wherefore the priest, leaving the altar, went with the Blessed Sacrament & the company to the place where the knocking was, but could not prevail by commands or conjurations to make it speak or show itself.’ The priest responded to his failure by leaving the Blessed Sacrament on the altar as protection. He told Anne to stay in the room, ‘to expect courageously & constantly the coming of the Spirit to her’, and told her what she should say to the ghost.136 Unusually, Atkins acknowledged that a laywoman might be able to converse with a spirit where an exorcist could not. Whereas Mr Hall went first to the parson, others initially appealed to cunning-folk for domestic exorcism. In 1672, the owner of a haunted house enlisted two ‘witches’ (that is, cunning-folk); when they were unsuccessful, he told a Jesuit that he would become a Catholic if he were freed from the disturbances. The priest carried the sacrament through the house whilst reciting the Litany of Loreto. It was probably the vaunted ability of Catholic priests to exorcize haunted houses that led the captors of the Jesuit John Bennet to house him in a room ‘terribly haunted with evil spirits and hobgoblins’ in 1625. Bennet, undeterred, ‘using sacred prayers, exorcisms and the accustomed ceremonies of the holy Church … so freed that place as it was never more troubled with evil spirits or nocturnal terrors’.137 An attempt to punish the priest became an opportunity for further Catholic propaganda. Bede Travers devoted an entire chapter of his autobiography to ‘mysterious occurrences’, among them the exorcism of a haunted house. Sir Thomas Raymond, an eminent lawyer and a non-Catholic, approached Travers concerning a house he had recently bought from the Throckmortons, Tremnals in the parish of Downham, Essex. Sir Thomas declared that ‘There were such terrible noises at night, caused by infernal spirits, that he would be compelled to sell it again, being unable to live in it, unless I came and blessed the house.’ When Travers enquired why Sir Thomas did not seek help from his own clergy, he elicited a response that suggested that Sir Thomas was a crypto-Catholic: ‘I asked him why he did not rather seek the blessing of a minister of his own Church, since he knew me to be a Catholic priest? His reply was that he placed more faith and confidence in us than in them, and that he was well disposed towards Catholics, though himself a Protestant.’ On arrival at Tremnals, Travers found that the entire family and its servants had confined themselves to one wing for fear of the supernatural 136 137

  Hallett (2007b), p. 162.   Foley, vol. 4, p. 500.

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noises. Travers chose to sleep in the most haunted room, ‘as I was not afraid of the infernal spirits’, and the whole house passed an untroubled night. In the morning, Travers said mass and then, ‘Having blessed water and sprinkled it with all the assistants, I blessed the whole house with the usual ceremony.’ Whether this was Thyraeus’ rite or one of Travers’s own invention is unclear. Travers noted that a Catholic lady who accompanied him to Tremnals noticed ‘a most sweet fragrance’ as soon as she entered the house. Travers smelt nothing, ‘which leads me to think that it must have had a supernatural cause, Our Lord wishing to deliver the house from the power of demons in reward of the piety of its owners, who had recourse to the Catholic Church’.138 There is some evidence that, in the spiritually highly charged atmosphere of prisons, cut off from the ministry of the clergy, lay recusants resorted to improvized rituals of their own. In 1601, a recusant attempted to exorcize a spirit troubling a group of women in Winchester gaol.139 Named simply as Miles, he was sent for from another part of the gaol by the non-Catholic women, who believed a spirit which appeared in animal form was the husband of one of the prisoners, Goodwife Dalley, who had died in Ireland. Miles found the women in tears, saying that they had seen ‘a thinge great & black w[i]th great Eyes and tow feite’. Miles, who saw nothing, initially said the words ‘Jesus Nazarenus elp avoide Satham in the name of Jesus’.140 He returned to his room and prayed, then came back to the women with two candles, one of wax and the other of tallow. The tallow candle was blown out and the wax candle burnt with a blue flame.141 Miles later claimed that the wax candle was ‘a halowed Candell’. On the following Sunday, Miles returned and said the same words as before. The women saw the spirit running at him, but Miles saw nothing and only smelt ‘a hote savor’. He also felt ‘a wynde’ hit him on the side, as a result of which a lump rose on his skin ‘w[hi]ch yett is not well’. The exorcism was apparently unsuccessful, as the manifestations of the spirit continued: nocturnal knocking and groaning and the spontaneous turning of the women’s spinning wheels. In the late seventeenth century, Mary Parish proved to be a slightly more successful Catholic lay exorcist than Miles. She gained a reputation 138

  Zimmermann (1899), pp. 254–7.   Hitchcock, J., ‘An Occurrence in Winchester Gaol, 1601’, Folklore 78

139

(1967), pp. 46–8 (a transcription of depositions taken by the Sheriff of Hampshire, Bodleian Library, Tanner MSS 76, fol. 146). 140   Words similar to those in the satirical pamphlet Tarltons Newes out of Purgatorie (London, 1590), ‘In nomine Jesu, avoid, Satan’, and ostensibly a traditional form of self-protection that predated the Reformation. 141   Burning with a blue flame was a typical sign of the presence of spirits.

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as a healer by casting a spirit ‘visibly out’ of a girl called Partridge,142 and she regularly exorcized spirits guarding buried treasure for her patron, Goodwin Wharton.143 There is abundant evidence that the laity used candles blessed by the Jesuits to protect domestic animals from witchcraft.144 These practices existed on the boundary between superstition (as defined by the church) and acceptable practice. If they retained an essential dependence on the clergy for the blessing of the objects themselves then they could be endorsed as legitimate, but even then the clergy had no control over the ways in which a blessed object might be used. The Legacy of Folklore In 1940, Christina Hole noted that ‘A curious belief still obtains, even in Protestant circles, that a Roman Catholic priest is better fitted to perform the ceremony [of exorcism] than the ministers of any other denomination’.145 There is some evidence from folklore to support this view, especially from the north. In 1725, Henry Bourne, a curate in Newcastle, noted that it was ‘common for the present Vulgar to say, none can lay a Spirit but a Popish Priest’.146 In the first half of the nineteenth century, the Anglican clergyman John Atkinson was asked to lay spirits by an old woman in Yorkshire, and when he refused she replied, ‘Ay, but if I had sent for a priest o’t’au’d church, he was a’ deean it. They wur a vast mair powerful conjurers than you Church-priests.’147 The folk-memory of the Dominican Robert Armstrong that lingered in the Hexham area 45 years after his death suggests that effective Catholic exorcists were highly valued. In 1878, a Catholic priest apparently laid the ghost of Hannah Corbridge, of Laneshaw Bridge, near Colne in Lancashire. She was murdered in 1789, and her spirit had roamed the area where her body was dumped. In Kirkby Lonsdale, there was a legend in the nineteenth century that three Catholic priests had laid a ghost under the local Devil’s Bridge.148 All of the examples of exorcist-priests in English folklore are from the north. In the vast majority of exorcism-related tales recorded by folklorists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, north and south, 142

Kent Clark (1984), p. 27. Ibid., pp. 97–9. Foley, vol. 7:2, p. 1071. Hole, C., English Folklore (London: Batsford, 1940), p. 162. Bourne, H., Antiquitates Vulgares (London, 1725), p. 90. Atkinson, J., Forty Years in a Moorland Parish (London: M.T.D. Rigg, 1891), p. 59. 148   Davies (2007b), p. 75.     144   145   146   147   143

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the protagonists were parsons, not Catholic priests. The vast majority of English people, unless they lived in an area dominated by a Catholic landlord, were unlikely to encounter a Catholic priest. More than one parson was often involved in these stories, usually a ‘magical’ number such as 12 or 24. The parsons ‘laid’ the evil spirit by ‘reading him down’, sometimes meaning that the spirit literally decreased in size until it could be confined in a small vessel such as a bottle. Almost invariably, the vessel was then deposited in water while the spirit pleaded not to be sent to the Red Sea. Sometimes bells and candles were employed.149 Exorcism was believed to be more effective if languages such as Latin and Greek were used, although on one occasion a spirit was induced to depart because the officiating clergyman used Arabic.150 The more exotic the language, it seems, the more persuasive against evil spirits. John Rudall, curate of Launceston in the 1660s and the best-known West Country exorcist, deployed methods of exorcism closer to ritual magic than anything in the Roman rite. In 1665, Rudall sought permission from the Bishop of Exeter to exorcize the ghost of Dorothy Dinglet, who was haunting the son of a Mr Bligh of Botathen as he crossed the fields to reach his tutor. On 12 January 1665, Rudall conducted an exorcism in the haunted field, making use of a magic circle, a pentacle, a ‘crutch of rowan’, a brass ring engraved with the scutum Davidis, and a parchment scroll from which he chanted conjurations in Syriac.151 Rudall’s use of magical practices of this kind illustrates the distance between Protestant and Catholic exorcists. Rudall drew on a tradition of Neoplatonic theurgy that had more in common with John Dee than with his Jesuit counterparts. The fact that Rudall and several other popular exorcist parsons were celibate does not argue in favour of a Catholic link;152 celibacy was also considered a necessary preparation for participation in magical rites. It is unlikely that exorcist parsons fulfilled the role of unavailable Catholic priests, and more likely that priests, parsons, Methodist ministers and cunning-folk all fulfilled a more fundamental magical role demanded by popular belief. Whilst this role was fulfilled by priests in the Middle Ages, exorcism was not associated with them to the exclusion of other clergy, and the evidence suggests that this folk-belief was very flexible indeed. Nevertheless, in areas of the country where Catholic priests had recently promoted exorcism, it was natural that popular demand should 149

  Several typical folkloric accounts of exorcisms can be found in Leather, E.M., The Folk-lore of Herefordshire (Hereford: Jakeman and Carver, 1912), pp. 29–31. 150   Westwood and Simpson (2006), p. 188. 151   Hole (1940), pp. 162–4. 152   Brown (1961), p. 390.

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focus on those most willing to exorcize. The claim that belief in the power of Catholic priests survived the Reformation and was still alive in the nineteenth century is not plausible. Instead, a general desire for exorcism existed and where Catholic priests were available they exploited it. Sceptical Responses In the 1650s, Kenelm Digby advocated a sceptical attitude towards supernatural phenomena derived from Thomas White’s view that imagination was dependent on the movement of atoms from one part of the body to another. White’s quasi-materialist analysis of the mind rendered virtually limitless imagination’s power over the body, with the consequence that Blackloists embraced a strikingly modern understanding of ‘psychological’ phenomena: Now lets consider how the strong imagination of one man doth marvailously act upon another man, who hath it more feeble and passive. We see dayly, that if a person gape, those who see him gaping, are excited to do the same. If one come perchance to converse with persons that are subject to excesse of laughter, one can hardly forbear laughing, although one doth not know the cause why they laugh. If one should enter into a house, where all the World is sad, he becomes melancholy.

Digby went on to analyse the case of a woman who believed herself to be possessed. In reality, Digby concluded, her symptoms derived from a deepseated resentment against her husband, but this did not prevent them from spreading to her female relatives: I have known a very melancholy woman, which was subject to the disease called the Mother, and while she continued in that mood, she thought her self possessed, and did strange things, which among those that knew not the cause, passed for supernatural effects, and of one possessed by the ill spirit: she was a person of quality, and all this happened, because of the deep resentment she had for the death of her Husband: She had attending her four or five young Gentlewomen, whereof some were her Kinswomen, and others served her as Chambermaids. All these came to be possessed as she was, and did prodigious actions.

The sophistication of Digby’s approach lay in his insistence that ‘there was neither imposture, or dissimulation in this.’ The victims of supposed ‘possession’ were the unwitting victims of their own psyche. By adopting this view Digby was not obliged, like Protestant critics of possession and exorcism, to provide proof that possessions were deliberately faked.

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Digby explained the behaviour of the nuns of the Ursuline convent at Loudun, whose convulsions he witnessed in 1634, in terms of what modern psychologists would recognize as a folie à deux: ‘when two Lutes, or two Harps, near one another, both set to the same tune, if you touch the strings of the one, the other consonant harp will sound at the same time, though no body touch it.’153 Bede Travers expressed less strident scepticism than Digby but was suspicious of individual cases. Nevertheless, Travers’s belief in the reality of spirits was unshaken and he certainly believed that Tremnals was genuinely haunted. However, when he encountered the Catholic wife of a non-Catholic coachman who believed she was possessed, Travers instructed her to make a general confession, go to mass, and look after her household, noting that ‘She obeyed in every point, and was soon cured of her delusion.’ On another occasion, Travers was approached by a widow and a spinster, both Catholics, who claimed that they had seen an enormous ‘thing’ enter their room in the middle of the night, although the doors were locked. They even presented Travers with a Latin document ‘to the effect that the “thing” wished to speak to me privately’. Travers visited the house and spent the night in the haunted room, noting that there was some knocking in the corner: When I went downstairs again I found [the widow] quite frantic with terror, her husband, who had been dead for several years, having appeared to her enveloped with smoke, and intimated that he could not leave Purgatory until certain debts contracted during his lifetime were paid.

The widow’s uncle, along with Travers, contributed enough money to cover the supposed debts. However, Travers was suspicious and tracked down the ‘creditor’, who said that the husband died without debts and that he had received no money from the widow. Travers returned to the widow and extracted a confession from her that she had ‘been driven by great distress to obtain money by inventing this ghost story’.154 Decline and Revival: Exorcism in the Age of Enlightenment Apart from a few cases of clerical unbewitchment such as those recorded in the convent annals of the English Convent, Bruges, there is precious little evidence of exorcisms of possessed persons or haunted houses in the 153   Digby, K. (trans. R. White), A late Discourse made in a solemne Assembly … touching the Cure of Wounds by the Powder of Sympathy (London, 1658), pp. 93–5. 154   Zimmermann (1899), pp. 258–9.

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English Catholic community for the remainder of the eighteenth century. Davies has argued that, as Catholics dwindled in numbers, Methodists tended to take over the role of priests as the ultimate recourse of the possessed.155 Methodists had an active interest in promoting their cause by successful exorcisms, and they were simultaneously the spiritual successors of puritans like John Darrell and high churchmen like Thomas Deacon. On the other hand, there was a lack of connection between what Methodist exorcists professed to do (exorcism by the Word of God) and what many of their clients believed – that they were men with magical powers.156 Catholic belief in the inherent dignity of the priestly office was, in this case, closer to folk belief than the claims of dissenters. Exorcisms were far more prevalent in eighteenth-century France than in England. In France, exorcism was an accepted and legitimate function of the clergy, and attention-seekers who deliberately feigned possession could not only guarantee an audience but also the involvement of highstatus members of their community.157 Needless to say, none of these conditions obtained for English Catholics; the established church did not even accept the existence of Catholic clergy, let alone their function as exorcists. Counterfeit possessions served no purpose among English Catholics. Furthermore, from the late seventeenth century, it became common for Catholics and Protestants alike to view most actual possessions as manifestations of physical or mental illness whilst maintaining the possibility of genuine possessions as a matter of faith.158 In one Catholic country, Austria, exorcisms were banned altogether in 1758.159 The absence of evidence of Catholic exorcisms in eighteenth-century England makes it difficult to gauge the impact of Continental ideas on English Catholics. Alexander Pope made satirical use of the language of exorcism in his ‘squib’ on Frederick, Prince of Wales and the six Maids of Honour to Queen Caroline, The Six Maidens (1732), reversing the logic of possession so that the ‘Devil’ was possessed by the maids, rather than vice versa: ‘And sure of all Devils this must be the best, / Who by six such fair Maidens at once is possest’. The infernal imagery permitted ribald innuendo: ‘But then they’re so blithe and so buxome withal, / As, tho ten Devils rose, they could make them to fall’. The language of demonology also provided Pope with a political play on words; the Prince of Wales 155

Davies (1999), p. 23. Ibid., p. 27. Ibid., p. 29. Cameron (2010), pp. 293–4. Klueting, H., ‘The Catholic Enlightenment in Austria or the Habsburg Lands’, in Lehner, U.L. and Printy, M., A Companion to the Catholic Enlightenment in Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2010), pp. 127–64, at p. 114.     157   158   159   156

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‘treateth them all, like a Prince of the Air’.160 ‘Prince of the Air’, a Biblical title of Satan, was also an appropriate one for a Prince without power who was also ‘heir’ to the throne. In spite of Pope’s willingness to make fun of the language of demonology, exorcisms of a kind happened daily in Catholic chapels throughout England, since the casting out of evil spirits from the infant was an integral part of baptismal rites. In addition, exorcism was a preparatory rite to the blessing of holy water and consecrated salt before mass. At least three treatises dealing with the role of exorcism in the liturgy were produced during the course of the eighteenth century: two by Gregory Greenwood (on baptism) and a third by an anonymous secular priest in the Midland District at some time in the middle years of the century, who explained the exorcism of water and salt in the context of an exposition of the prayers of the mass.161 Greenwood emphasized the essentially protective and preventative character of baptismal exorcism:162 He himself in Person vilified, expell’d & scorn’d with the utmost contempt by us; Call’d by the disgraceful, & ignominious names therein, of unclean Spirit, a Cursed Damn’d Wretch, a Cursed Devil & Commanded by the Priest that Christens us, in the name, & by the Power of \God/ committed to him, Instantly to be gone from us, & give place to the Holy Ghost. Exorcised & Conjured in the Name of the Father, & Of the Son, & of the Holy Ghost, to go forth, & depart immediately … & the Sign of the \holy/ Cross stamp’d upon our Foreheads at our Baptism, he is severely warn’d never to presume to violate. Infine, the Infant who is Christen’d, The Baptismal water, The Salt, & the Holy Oyles, are all Exorcis’d & Bless’d; & nothing used in Baptism, but what is Bless’d & sanctified, the Better to preserve us, & protect us from the Malice of our Infernal Enimy.

In spite of his belief in witchcraft, there is no evidence that Greenwood ever engaged in exorcisms of the possessed. It seems likely that his view that baptismal exorcism sufficed to fulfil the church’s duty to protect the faithful from evil was prevalent among eighteenth-century among priests, and the practice of exorcizing the bewitched on the English mission lapsed after 1700.

160

  Pope, Poems, pp. 815–16. On exorcism in the Enlightenment period, see also Midelfort, H.C.E., Exorcism and Enlightenment: Johann-Joseph Gassner and the Demons of Eighteenth-Century Germany (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005). 161   ‘Explanation of the exorcism or blessing of Holy Water and the prayers and ceremonies of the Mass’, Birmingham Archdiocesan Archives, C546. 162   Three Discourses, fols 58–9.

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Alban Butler emphasized the importance of the Holy Name of Jesus in combating the power of Satan, whilst cautioning against the danger of superstition: ‘It is a Name of Terror to the Devils, who tremble at the Sound when it is devoutly pronounced; not that the material Syllables contain any Virtues or Charm.’ Butler observed that the Holy Name ‘has often chased [devils] out of those whom they corporally possessed, and when devoutly invoked, it weakens the Power of the Tempter in his assaults’. Like Thomas Deacon and the Wesleys, Butler justified his claims by reference to the practice of exorcism in the early church: ‘Christians thus, by an ordinary Rule, expelled Devils out of Demoniacs in the primitive Ages.’163 Butler gave copious examples from the Fathers, noting that even if the details of the stories were implausible, their doctrinal content was consistent: ‘If any suspect this to have been a hearsay Report, at least, they must allow this to have been the constant Doctrine and Practice of that early Age.’164 For Butler as for Greenwood, maintaining the reality of Satan and his power was not a response to actual possessions but a means of safeguarding the church’s authority in an increasingly secular age. If the devil was real, the church was needed. Just after Easter 1815, Edward Peach, the priest in charge of St Chad’s, Birmingham, was told that Mrs White, a recently married non-Catholic in King’s Norton, Worcestershire, was afflicted with an illness that her relatives attributed to ‘the malice of a rejected admirer, who, they said, had employed the assistance of a reputed wizard at Dudley, to do her a mischief’. The story resembled the stereotyped exorcism accounts presented in the popular press at the time. Davies has discerned two types of spirit possession in these, one involving bodily fits and the other classic ‘poltergeist’ activity; ‘internal’ and ‘external’ possession. Both were generally centred on young women and blamed on witchcraft. Cunning-folk were either blamed for the phenomena or brought in to deal with them.165 Furthermore, the devil sometimes manifested himself in a grossly physical form, as he did in the Worcestershire case, appearing as a large snake outside Mrs White’s house that had to be killed by her Catholic neighbour. Peach paid little attention to the story at first, but a little later Mrs White’s sister met one of Peach’s parishioners and gave him more details. The local parson was unable to assist Mrs White but a Catholic woman gave her temporary relief by administering holy water. Peach sent his informant to investigate, and heard back that ‘all the family were desirous of seeing me, and particularly the young woman herself’. It was not until

163

  Butler (1774), p. 138.   Ibid., pp. 378–9. 165   Davies (1999), p. 26. 164

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2 May that a messenger came asking for his assistance, and Peach finally went to Worcestershire. The weather was suitably gothic: No sooner had I cleared the skirts of the town, than I heard the noise of distant thunder before me. Before I had proceeded two miles, the storm was nearly over my head; and I may say, that during the remainder of my walk, and during the time I was with her, there was hardly a cessation of one minute between the claps of thunder. I do not say that in this there was any thing supernatural; but knowing the business I was upon, it was truly awful.

Peach found that Mrs White’s condition had deteriorated. When he questioned her, ‘she was positive, she said, that it was the young man who had done her a mischief.’ Peach insisted that, before he proceeded, she should affirm her belief in ‘the Holy Catholic Church’, and Mrs White assured him that she had done so ever since she experienced the effects of holy water. Peach carried out two tests before reading the rite of exorcism; first, he drew a cross on her forehead with holy water, which ‘scalded’ her, and secondly he said the Lord’s Prayer with her, which she was unable to do without great difficulty. Finally, he read the exorcism: Now it was that I felt in a particular manner the awful situation in which I was. All alone, with a person in her distressed condition – the lightning flashing, and the thunder rolling – and I with an imperative voice commanding the evil spirit to reply to my interrogatories, and to go forth from her. I acknowledge that my flesh began to creep, and my hair to stand on end.

Peach conditionally baptized Mrs White since he had reason to believe that she had either not been baptized, or her baptism was defective. Subsequently, she returned to perfect health. In June 1816, Peach published an account of the exorcism in a Catholic monthly magazine, The Catholicon, printed in Birmingham by George Keating.166 The Catholicon was a magazine of ultramontane tendencies that opposed the Cisalpine movement, and it was supported by the pugnacious ultramontane controversialist John Milner, Vicar Apostolic of the Midland District. Peach was a close associate of Milner, who arranged for his

166

  Peach, E., ‘An Account of an Exorcism successfully performed, with the Exorcist’s Reflections thereon’, Catholicon 2 (January–June 1816), pp. 236–42, later reprinted as Peach, E., A Circumstantial Account of a Successful Exorcism, Performed at King’s Norton, Worcestershire, in the Year 1815; Accompanied by Reflections which that Extraordinary Event Produced in the Mind of the Exorcist (Birmingham: R.P. Stone, 1836). For a summary of Peach’s 1836 pamphlet, see Davies (1999), pp. 23–6.

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portrait to be engraved and even celebrated Milner’s requiem mass.167 Peach noted that Mrs White ‘had been taught to entertain the greatest aversion to Popish superstition and witchcraft’, and yet had been prepared to accept the ministrations of a Catholic priest. He recognized that ‘such things, perhaps, may not be believed in these times’ but expressed his belief that ‘there are many pious souls in these times … who do not require supernatural proofs for supernatural occurrences.’ Peach observed that Protestants tended not to believe in the possibility of demonic possession, but that this had nothing to do with the Reformation; rather, ‘the spirit of incredulity has kept pace with the pretended refinements of the age.’ However, there is a note of caution in Peach’s account. Mrs White ‘had every appearance of being possessed’ and he referred to her possession as a ‘mental affliction’. At no point, in fact, did Peach unequivocally assert that he believed the woman to be possessed, nor did he endorse the idea that she was bewitched. For Peach, the fact that a woman who had never been exposed to Catholicism embraced it almost instantly was more important than the exorcism itself. In this respect, Peach’s practice followed in the tradition of the Jesuit ‘missionary’ exorcisms of the seventeenth century. In July 1816, an anonymous contributor to The Catholicon calling himself ‘X’ declared that ‘nothing could exceed the consolation I experienced on the perusal of the Rev. E. Peach’s account, given in your last number, of the successful Exorcism he lately performed, and have no doubt but this feeling has been pretty general amongst your Catholic readers.’ ‘X’ was in fact none other than Milner himself.168 Milner acknowledged English Catholics’ unfamiliarity with exorcism narratives: ‘In some Catholics the event may excite surprise, but that feeling can only be a momentary one, and must be followed by the fullest credence in all who know the reliance that is to be placed in a statement of the pastor.’169 For Milner, the appropriate response to natural scepticism was the suspension of disbelief and an unquestioning reliance on the church’s authority; this was something new in English Catholicism, and a harbinger of the ultramontanism of the mid-nineteenth century. Milner was convinced that possessions took place, ‘though such cases are not so frequently observed in Christendom as heretofore’. Nevertheless, the church had remedies, and since ‘infinite wisdom does nothing in vain’, there must be evil spirits prepared to take possession of people’s bodies – a curious case of reasoning backwards. Milner conceded that the storm 167

  Husenbeath, F.C., The Life of the Right Rev. John Milner, D. D. (Dublin: James Duffy, 1862), pp. 338, 528. 168   Husenbeath (1862), p. 320. 169   [Milner, J.], ‘On the Exorcism by the Rev. E. Peach’, Catholicon 4 (July– December 1816), pp. 23–4.

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during Peach’s exorcism might not have been raised by demonic agency, but insisted that priests follow Peach’s example by edifying the faithful through testimonies of the work of God ‘at a period in which the afflictions of the faithful are heavy, and the delusions of those who are opposed to them are active, powerful and vigilant’. This was an obvious swipe at the Cisalpinists who, as Catholics prepared to accommodate Enlightenment ideals, Milner considered more dangerous than Protestants. Cisalpinists, however, had sound political reasons to downplay the supernatural. Reports of abusive exorcisms in Ireland and elsewhere were regularly presented in the late 1820s by opponents of Catholic Emancipation as evidence of the barbarity and ‘mediaeval’ mentality of Catholics.170 Even after Emancipation was given the Royal Assent, a newspaper referred disparagingly to the ‘priest-protected fairies’.171 However, Catholics occasionally responded to the anti-exorcism rhetoric of the press. In 1824, an anonymous Catholic writing in The Morning Chronicle criticized a proposal to prosecute Irish Catholics who attempted exorcisms. The respondent suggested that to ban exorcism on the grounds that some people abused would be as silly as banning baptism because a madman might drown a child. The respondent drew attention to the normal status of exorcism within the Catholic liturgy as part of the baptism service; ‘exorcist’ was also a minor order of the clergy. However, the respondent’s belief in the reality of possession was passive rather than active: ‘Demoniacism is, of course, a supernatural influence, of rare occurrence at the present day; but of its existence in former times there can be no doubt.’172 It was more important to refute a rationalistic denial of Biblical miracles that imperilled the foundations of the Christian faith than to prove that miracles still took place. Catholics’ passive belief in the miraculous set them apart from those who, like the Methodists, emphasized the reality of the supernatural here and now.

170

  Exeter Flying Post, 13 March 1823; Leeds Mercury, 17 January 1824; Morning Post, 6 August 1824; Morning Post, 10 August 1824; Royal Cornwall Gazette, 14 August 1824; Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register, 16 October 1824; ‘Manners and State of the Irish’, Morning Chronicle, 5 August 1825; Morning Chronicle, 9 January 1826; Lancaster Gazette, 26 August 1826; Morning Chronicle, 31 January 1828; The Standard, 3 March 1828; Cambridge Chronicle and Journal, 14 March 1828; Morning Post, 8 December 1828; Sheffield Independent, 13 September 1828; ‘Ireland, described by Irishmen’, Morning Post, 20 December 1828. 171   London Standard, 15 October 1829. 172   ‘Casting out Devils’, Morning Chronicle, 7 August 1824.

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Appendix 1

Documented Catholic Exorcisms in England, 1577–1815 1

No.

Date

Location

Exorcist(s)

Victim(s)

1. 2.

1577 1585– 86

Unknown Denham; Fulmer; Uxbridge; Hackney; Cannon Row, London

John Nelson William Weston SJ; Anthony Tyrell; John Cornelius (Sec.); Robert Dibdale (Sec.); Christopher Thompson (Sec.); Thomas Stamp (Sec.); Christopher Dryland SJ; Christopher Thules (Sec.); Sherwood (Sec.); Winkfield; Mud; Edward Dakins (Sec.)

Anon. William Mainy; Nicholas Marwood; Friswood Williams; Sara Williams; Ann Smith; Trayford

Religious background of victim(s) Unknown Cath.

Religious background of source Cath. Cath. and Prot.

1   This list includes only those exorcisms that can be assigned to a specific date. Where there are reports that a certain priest carried out several exorcisms during his lifetime, as in the cases of Ambrose Barlow and Robert Armstrong, it is impossible to separate these out as individual incidents. Also excluded from this list are exorcisms that took place outside England but involved English Catholics, such as the exorcisms of Anne Blount and Anne Howard in 1709 and 1731.

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No.

Date

Location

Exorcist(s)

3.

1594

Hants.

Unknown

4.

1594

5.

1598

6.

1600

7.

1601

8. 9.

1604 1619

10.

1620

11.

1622

Anon. man Lancs. Unknown Anon. man Lancs. 2 unnamed Anon. priests woman Lancs. Unnamed Jane priests Ashton Winchester Miles Haunted (layman) prison cell Unknown Unnamed SJ Anon. Several, Unknown Unnamed SJs anon. Bilston, Staffs. H. Wheeler William Perry (Sec.) and others Unknown Unnamed SJ Anon. boy

12.

1625

Unknown

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

Victim(s)

John Bennet Haunted SJ house 1626 London Unnamed SJ Anon. woman 1635 London Unnamed SJ Anon. woman 1636 Suffolk Unnamed SJ Anon. 1637 Kent Unnamed SJ Anon. woman 1638/9 Westmoreland Unnamed SJ Anon. woman 1640 Co. Durham Unnamed SJ Anon. man 1643 Norfolk Unnamed SJ Anon. 1651 Lancs. Unnamed SJ Anon. 1655 Unknown Unnamed SJ Dairy 1656 Halfcote, William House of Worcs. Atkins SJ Mr Hall Feb. Cannock, William House of 1658 Staffs. Atkins SJ Charles Coleman 1663 Holborn, Blake (Sec.) Anne London Prince 1663 Strand, Blake (Sec.) Edmund London Swine

Religious background of victim(s) Cath.

Religious background of source Cath.

Cath.

Cath.

Unknown

Prot.

Prot.

Prot.

Prot.

Prot.

Prot. Prot.

Cath. Cath.

Prot.

Prot.

Prot. Prot.

Cath. and Prot. Cath.

Cath.

Cath.

Prot.

Cath.

Unknown Cath.

Cath. Cath.

Unknown

Cath.

Unknown

Cath.

Cath. Unknown Unknown Prot.

Cath. Cath. Cath. Cath.

Cath.

Cath.

Unknown

Cath.

Unknown

Cath.

AppendIX 1: DOcumented CathOlIc EXOrcIsms In EnGland

26.

1672

Unknown

27. 28.

1676/7 Unknown 1696 Orrel, Lancs.

29.

1815

King’s Norton, Oxon.

Unnamed SJ Haunted house Unnamed SJ Anon. girl Thomas Robert Ashton Brook SJ John Baines (Sec.) John Skinner SJ Edward Mrs White Peach (Sec.)

Unknown

Cath.

Anabaptist Unknown

Cath. Prot.

Prot.

Cath.

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Appendix 2

‘Three Discourses of Witches and Witchcraft’ by Gregory Greenwood Three Discourses. Of Witches & Witchcraft. & the fatal Mischiefs which are acted by the Devil, frequently in the world by ’em. The First Discours. [Latin quotation] Brethren, be Strengthened in the Lord, & in the Might of his Power. Put on you the armour of God, that you may stand against the Snares of the Devil. For our wrestling is not against Flesh & Blood but against Principalities & Powers, against the Rulers of the World of this Darkness, against the Evil Spirits of wickedness in the Air. Ephes[ians] Ch[apter] 6. V. V. 10. 11. 12. Tis not without good reason, C[hristian] A[uditor] that St Paul so earnestly then exhorted the People of Ephesus, & in them, all Christians nowadays, by the words of my Text, to be constantly upon their guard, & ever carefully to beware, for fear of being surprised at unawares, by the Crafty stratagems, & dangerous delusions of the Devil, the Implacable & mortal Enimy to all mankind, ever seeking & endeavouring utterly to ruine us, & eternally involve us in his own Damnation, by all the subtle, & mischievous ways that tis possible for him to do it. Tis for this, that St Peter advises \us/ to be sober & watchful at all times, telling us, that our Infernal Enimy the Devil, runs roving about continually seeking whom he may \devour/, whom he exhortes us to resist manfully, keeping stedfast in the Faith. Tis for this, that the Church warns us soon after we are born, utterly to renounce the Devil, & all his Works, & Pomps: Which by our God-Fathers, & God-Mothers, who stand for us at our Baptism, we all promise & engage to do to the Longest day we live. Tis for this that the Church has Order’d all Christians to be Exorcis’d by the Priest, who is to Christen ’em, before they receive their Baptism, in the words that are here following: – I Exorcise thee, O Unclean Spirit, In the Name of the Father. + & Of the Son. + & of the Holy + Ghost. That thou go forth, & Depart, from this servant of God. N: for tis He that Commands thee, Cursed Damn’d Wretch, Who walk’d dry-shod on the sea, & stretch’d forth his

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right hand to Peter just a sinking: therefore, cursed Devil, acknowledg the sentence thou Lyest under; & give honour to the true & Everliving God; give honour to Jesus X[ris]t his Son; & to the Holy Ghost; & depart from this Servant of God. N. Because God, & Our Lord Jesus Christ has vouchsaf’d to call him, to his Holy Grace, & Blessing, & to the Font of Baptism. & then making the Sign of the Cross on the Forehead of the Infant, He says, – & this Sign of the Holy Cross, + which we Stamp upon his Forehead, Thou Cursed Devil, never dare to violate. Thrô the same Christ our Lord. Amen. Thus you see, Christian Auditors, how sollicitous the Apostles were in the most early days of Christianity, & how Vigilant & Careful the Holy Church has been, ever since that time, to preserve us, & protect us, from the Devil; our invidious, Inveterate, Implacable & infernal Enimy: Both by severely forbidding us to have anithing to do with him; & by \utterly/ debarring him from having anithing to do with us: Thus to cut off entirely by all means possible, all manner of Comunication between him & us. But to give you a little insight into the Hellish Contrivances, odd Inventions, & unaccountable practises he has used from time [to] time to delude Mankind; & to make you more sensible of the fatal danger of ’em; that by being thus forewarn’d, you may be fore-arm’d against ’em: I shall take this opportunity to speak to you a word or two, on that important subject; to convince you of the horrid abominations, & notorious villanies that have been Acted by Devils in former ages, & may still perhaps be practis’d, up & down the world, thô unknown to us, even at this very day. Tis an uncommon subject, but what may deserve I hope the favour of your Attention. I cannot propose any better method to my self, in Entering upon this Discours, C[hristian] A[uditor] than by relating to you a true & exact account of a Sentence or two, that were pronounc’d some years ago, in France, against several Persons both Men & Women, arraigned, convicted, & Condemn’d for witchcraft, & dealing with the Devil: And According to their Sentence burnt & consum’d to Ashes, as the Laws both of God & Man in such cases direct. The First sentence is thus as follows. A True & Exact Account, Of a Sentence given at Avignon in France, Against Eighteen Wizards, & Witches In the Year of our Lord. 1582. at Which, The Reverend Father Sebastian Michaelis, Prior of the Convent Royal of St Magdalen at St Maximin, & St Braume, (The Authour from Whom I have taken this Extract of it,) Declares, that He himself was Actually Present; & an Assistant to the Inquisitor of the Faith at that Time, in it. Faithfully translated into English, From the Latine, just as it was then Read, & Pronounced in the Court against ’em. Having seen the Processes, against N. N. N. &c: (Naming every one of the 18. Malefactors in particular, One after tother) Guilty, Accus’d, &

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Brought, & standing here before us; In which, Both by your own Account, & by the acknowledgment, & Confession of Every one of you in particular, juridically made before us, in due form of Law, often confirm’d by you, even with a Solemn Oath: as also, by the Depositions, Accusations, & testimonies of Witnesses, & Other Lawfull Evidences, & Proofs, resulting from the said Acts & Process; It has clearly been made out, & it appears plain & Evident to us, that you all, & Every one of you, have Denied Our God, One in Essence, & Three in Persons, the Supreme Maker & Creator of all things in Being: & have worshipp’d the Accursed Devil, the Old inveterate Enimy of Mankind; & have given yourselves up to him forever more; & utterly have renounced your most sacred Baptism, & those who stood for you Godfathers & Godmothers at your Christening: & your share of Paradise, & Eternal inheritance, which our Lord Jesus Christ most mercifully purchac’d by his Death, Both for you, & all Mankind: All of this, you have renounc’d, in the presence of the Aforesaid Devil, appearing in human shape; The Horrid Devil pouring again other water on you, which you receiv’d, Changing your \True/ Christian Name, which had been given you before, at the sacred Font of Baptism: & thus you have suffer’d another Feigned Name to be impos’d upon you, & have accepted of it; & for a Pledge of your Fidelity to the Devil, you have given him a little piece, or scantling of your Clothes: & that the Father of Lyes might effectually take care to have you struck out, & utterly effac’d out of the Book of Life, at his Order, & Command, You have set your Names down, with your own hand, in a Dismal Black Book, prepar’d for that purpose, as a Catalogue of the Reprobate, of the Damn’d, & of Everlasting Death; & that He might have you Faster & more closely bound, for so horrid a Perfidiousness, & so abominable an Impiety, He has stigmatiz’d Every one of you with a Mark or Brand, as things properly appartaining to Himself: & By his Orders, & Commands, you have Bound your selves, by Oath, taken by you all, & by Every one of you, upon a Circle, (which is an Emblem of the Divinity,) Drawn upon the Earth, (which is the footstool of God’s Feet) trampling in contempt under your feet, the Cross, the sacred sign of your Redemption, in Obedience to him, \&/ by the help of a Staff, dawb’d all over with a most execrable Ointment prescrib’d you by the Devil himself, Getting astride upon it, You have been transported & Carryed thrô the Air, to a Place appointed, at Midnight, a fit & Convenient Hour for such Vilanies, & upon days assign’d by the Tempter Himself: & there, at the Common Rendevouz of many other Magicians, Sorcerers, Witches, Hereticks, Enchanters, & Worshipers of Devils, before a horrid & dismal Fire, after great rejoicings, Dancing, Junketing, Revelling, Sporting, & all manner of disorderly Merriments & Diversions in honour of Belzebub the Prince of Devils, there Presiding, in the form & shape, of a most filthy, Illfavour’d. stinking & nasty Black

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English Catholics and the Supernatural, 1553–1829

Goat, you have ador’d him as God, both in words & Deeds; & have made your addresses to him, in the most humble manner, upon your very knees, & have made offerings to him of lighted Candles made of Pitch, & have kiss’d with your sacrilegious Mouths, & with the Greatest Reverence, That Part, Oh Shame! which is the filthiest, & most beastly about him; & have call’d on him by the Name of the True God; & have implored his Assistance, to revenge your selves of any such Persons, against whom you have had any Pique or Grudg; or such, who have not Granted you at your petition, whatsoever you requested of ’em: & following his advice, you have practis’d Witchcrafts, enchantments, & other revengeful doings, both on humane creatures, & also on other animals: & a Great many poor little Infants, you have barbarously murder’d; & have been the cause of several cursed Mischiefs to many others, by the help of the Devil aforesaid, making ’em pine away by sucking ’em, & being the death of ’em by other most grievous illnesses: It has evidently been proved against you, that there have been Infants, (some only of you being appris’d of it, & consenting to it,) by the said mischievous Hellish art, smother’d, Stabb’d, & murder’d by you; & that after they have been buried in the Churchyard, you have dug ’em out of their Graves secretly, & by night, & have Carried them to the aforesaid Meeting of your rendevouz of Witches, & have made an offering of ’em to the Prince of Devils sitting on his Throne; Having taken out, & reserv’d to your selves the Fat, Head, Hands, & Feet cut off; & the Rest of the Body, you have taken \care/ to have stew’d, or Boil’d, & sometimes roasted: & by order & Command of your aforesaid Father, you have fed upon it, & damnably have devour’d it. In fine, Adding sin to sin, & heaping crimes upon Crimes, you Men, with Devils in female shape, you Women, with Devils in shape of Men, O Detestable Abomination! have had Carnal, or rather indeed Infernal copulation; & have shamefully committed with ’em, by their cold Embraces, downright Sodomy, & a most Abominable Crime. & what is yet the most detestable of all, by the Instigation of the said Hellish serpent, cast out of Paradise, The most adorable Sacrament \of the Holy Eucharist/ sometimes received by you, in the Holy Church of God, you have held in your mouths, & have impiously & Sacrilegiously spit it out again upon the Ground; that you might dishonour our True, & most holy God, with the greater ignominy, Affront, Impiety & Contempt; & by that means, promote the Devil, & his Honour, & Glory, & Triumph, & Kingdom; & thereby might Glorify, & Magnify, & set \Him/ forth with all the Honour, & Pomp, & Praise, & dignity, & authority & Adoration, that you were capable. All which most Horrible, most Abominable, & most detestable Practices of yours, tend directly to the dishonour & affront of God Almighty the Sovereign & Divine Creator. And therefore, We Brother Florus, Provincial of the Order of Dominican Friars, Doctor of Divinity, & Inquisitor General of

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the Holy Faith, over this whole Province of Avignon, Having the Fear of God before our eyes, here sitting in the Court of Justice, by this our definitive sentence, Which, by the advice of Doctors, & Divines, we give here in this writing, having call’d devoutly on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, & of the Blessed Virgin Mary; Do affirm, declare, pronounce, & definitively pass sentence that all you above named, & Every one of you, have been, & are, true Apostats, Idolaters, Deserters \from/ the most holy Faith. Renouncers, & Defiers of God Almighty, Sodomits, & Guilty of a most execrable Crime, Adulterers, Fornicators, Sorcerers, Magicians, Sacrilegious Vilains, Hereticks, Inchanters, Murderers, destroyers of Infants, Worshipers of Devils, Promoters of a Satanical, Diabolical, & Hellish cours of Life, & assertors of a damnable, & Reprobate kind of Faith. Blasphemers, Forswearers, Infamous Wretches, & convicted of all the most heinous Crimes, & notorious villainies upon Earth. Wherefore, by this our Sentence, we deliver you all, & Every one of you up, & refer you to the Sentence of the secular Court of Justice; to be punish’d by their Special Order, According as the Laws in such cases direct, & as you, effectually, & justly have deserv’d. A Sentence of Death Pronounc’d in the Court of Parliament of Provence, in France, Against One Lewis Gaufridy, a Magician. A Priest, & Beneficed Man in the Church of Acoules, in the City of Marseilles. the Last Day of April: in the year of our Lord. 1611. It has pleas’d the Court to Examine, & to inquire into the Criminal Process, & all Other Proceedings, made by the Authority of the said Court, at the Instance, & Procurement of the Kings Attorney General, Plaintif on one side, in the Case & Crime of Rape, Seducement, Blasphemy, Magick, Witchcraft, & such other Abominations, Against Lewis Gaufridy, a Native of Beau Vezer Les Colmats, Priest, & a Beneficed Man, in the Church of Acoules, in the City of Marseilles, Defendant, & Prisoner in the Jaile that Belongs to the Palace, on the Other. The Verbal Process of the Proofs, & Evidences, is as follows: That Magdalen of Demandouls, Otherwise of Pallud, One of the Nuns, of the Order of St Ursula, was possess’d, & esteem’d to be really possessed by wicked Spirits, that were known, & observ’d to have remain’d within her, at St Braume, from the First of January last past, till the Fifth of February, by Father Sebastian Michaelis, Doctor of Divinity, Vicar General of the Reform’d Congregation of the Dominican Friars, & Prior of the Convent Royal at St Maximin: which attestation was in due form & Manner confirm’d by many other Fathers; bearing date, the 20th day of the said Month. The Decree of the Court, containing the Granting out of a Commission to Mr Anthony Seguiran, a Counsellor in the said Court, to take all informations, which might concern the Fact of the said Accusation, & to

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Impeach the said Gaufridy, & commit him to the Prison of the Palace, upon the 10th of the said Month. The Informations & Inquisitions taken by the said Commissary, & the Verbal Process of the Apprehension, & Commitment of the said Gaufridy. Another Decree of the said Court, which contains a Commission granted forth to call Mr Anthony Thoron, a Counsellor likewise in the said Court, to hear the said Magdalen of Pallud, & to take a Particular Information of the Proofs, & Principal Allegations, given in by the Attorney general, & He himself, together with Monsieur Garandeau Vicar to the Archbishop of Aix, to indite the said Gaufridy, upon the 28th day of the said Month. The Hearing, Deposition, & Confessions of the said Magdalen, concerning the said Rape, seducement, & subornation of her, to practise these Impieties which belong to the Art Magick, as also touching the Contract & Promises made to the wicked Spirits; besides many Other Abominations, mention’d in the Verball Inditement of the 21. of the said Month. Another Bill of Informations taken by the said Commissary the 23. of the said Month. The Attestation of Mr Anthony Merindol Doctor of Physick, and the Kings Professor in the University of the City of Aix, concerning the Strange, and Extraordinary Gestures, & passages that happen’d to the Person of the said Magdalen of Pallud, during the time that He had her in cure, & before it was known that she was possess’d: on the 24th of the said Month. The Report made by the Appointment of the said Commissioners, & given into the Court by Mr James Fonteine, Lewis Grassy, & the said Merindol, Doctors, & Professors of Physick, & Peter Bontemps Surgeon, & profess’d Anatomist in the said University, touching the Quality, & Nature of those Extraordinary Motions which at set times & Intervals, affected the Head & brain of the Said Magdalen of Pallud, & what might be the Cause thereof: as also, touching the Nature, Causes & Reasons, of those Marks found in her Body, which made the Place void of all sense of feeling where they were; & which were likewise shew’d by Her: as also, Concerning her Virginity, & her being deflower’d; on the 26. and 27. of the said Month, & the 5. of March Last past. The Interrogatories, & Answers of the said Gaufridy, upon the 26. of February, & the 4th of March Last. Another Decree of the Said Court, that the said Mr Anthony Thoron, who was formerly Deputed to be Commissioner, should take the full view & Information of the said Inditement, upon the Fourth of March. The Verbal Process of the Confronting & Personal Contest between the said Magdalen of Pallud, and Gaufridy, abovenamed, upon the 5th of the said Month. The Report of the Marks found upon the Body of the said Gaufridy; following the Instructions, & Directions of the said Magdalen, upon the 8th of the said Month of March.

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The Publishing of the said Report, with the Confronting of him, with the said Physicians, & Surgeons, deputed & Commanded thereunto, by the said Commissioners. The Re-Examination, & Confronting of Other Witnesses, upon the 8th of March. Another Bill of Informations, taken in the City of Marseilles, upon the 5th, 6th & 7th of April. Last past. The Hearing of Mrs Victoire de Courbier, said, & suppos’d to have been bewitch’d by the said Gaufridy, by reason of the Craziness, & indisposition of her understanding; as also, because of her inordinate and scandalous affection for the said Gaufridy: upon the 6th of April. The Second Interrogatories made to the said Gaufridy, Concerning the truth of the said Information, which contain’d his Confession, that he had bewitch’d the said Victoire, by breathing upon her: the 12th & 16th of the said Month, of April. The Verbal Process of the Voluntary Confessions made by the said Gaufridy, touching other facts & Crimes laid to his Charge; the 14th & 15th of the said Month. The Retractations of the said Gaufridy, the 15th day of April aforesaid in the Afternoon. The Letters of the Bishop of Marseilles to Mr Joseph Pellicot, Provost of the Metropolitan Church of the City of Aix; & also Vicar to the Archbishop of Aix; that in his name, Autority & Power he should proceed in due form of Law against the said Gaufridy, belonging to his Diocess, in such full & Ample manner, as the Bishop himself might doe, if he were there present in his own Person; upon the 17th of the said Month. The Deputation of a Proctor made by the said Gaufridy before the said Provost, who by vertue of the aforesaid letter was his Ordinary, that so, prosecution might be made for the Restitution of those Scheduls, which are above mention’d, in the Informations there Contain’d. The Order of the said Counsellor, & Commissioner, & of the said Mr Pellicot, as well by Vertue of his Office, of Vicar to the said Bishop of Marseilles; as also, by reason, of his being Vicar to the Archbishop of Aix: that the said Magdalen of Pallud should be re-examin’d, concerning her allegations, & depositions, & should be again Confronted with the said Gaufridy. Divers other new Confessions made, & respectively repeated by Gaufridy the 22d & 23d of April, conformable to the Former. Another Report, of the Aforesaid Doctors of Phisick, & surgeons, touching the Effacing, razing, & Abolishing of the Marks on the Body of the said Magdalen of Pallud, with the reestablishment & confirmation of the Manner of ’em, set forth in the former report of the 23 of March. The Verbal Process of the Interruptions, & Extraordinary accidents

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which happen’d to the said Magdalen during the time of her Confession: The tortures, & the torments which she endur’d, & the Words which proceeded from her: Besides the Matters Contain’d in the Interrogatories & Answers, the Proof & Evidence of the Abolishment of the Marks; the re-establishment & Confirmation of the same; On Easter Day, & the Feasts following, during the Celebration of the Sacrifice of the Holy Mass: The Judgment of these objects; & the Conclusions of the Kings Attorney General Thereupon: The Day of Hearing Of the said Gaufridy in the Chamber; & the Report of the Commissioner deputed for the same. Hereupon, it was declar’d; That the Court has, & dos pronounce the Said Lewis Gaufridy attainted, Guilty, & Convicted of the Cases, & Crimes aforesaid, with which he has been charg’d: And to make some Amends, & reparation for the same, the said Court has & dos condemn him to be deliver’d up into the hands of the Executioner, for Criminal Matters: And to be led thrô, all the common streets, & Quarters of the City of Aix; & before the great Gate of the Metropolitan Church of St Sauiour, to perform this Penance: That is, to goe thither bare-headed, & bare-foot, with a Link burning in his hand, and a rope about his neck; & upon his knees to ask forgiveness of God, The King, & Justice. After which, He is to be brought to the Place of Preaching in the said Town, & there to be burnt alive in a Pile of Wood (which shall be prepar’d for that purpose) untill his Body, & Bones be consume’d, & turned to Ashes: Which shall afterward be cast up, & scatter’d into the air; & all his goods, & Every parcel thereof, shall be seiz’d upon, & confiscated to the King. And before he be Executed, He shall be Tortur’d, & put upon the Rack, both after the Ordinary, & Extraordinary Manner, to force from his Mouth, the true Detection of his Accomplices. Nevertheless, before he has the said Execution of Death perform’d upon him, he shall be deliver’d up into the Hands of the Bishop of Marseilles, His Diocesan; or in his Absence, into the hands of any other Prelate of Quality befitting the same; to be Degraded, from his Sacred Orders, according to the usual Manner in such cases provided. Given in the Parliament of Provence residing at Aix, & publish’d at the Bar of Justice; & to the said Gaufridy in the Palace Prison: Who at the same time, was put to the Rack, both after the Ordinary, & extraordinary Manner; the Commissioners that were deputed unto the same, being there present. And about five a-clocke in the Afternoon, He was put to death; being first degraded by the Lord Bishop of Marseilles, his Diocesan, in the Church of the Dominicans at Aix; in the presence of the said Commissioners, According to the form & Tenour of this present Sentence, The Last day of Aprill: 1611. Sign’d Maliverny.

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From the First of these two Sentence above rehears’d, I shall take occasion, C[hristian] A[uditor] to make some Few Annotations, on the most material, & most remarkable expressions in it, relating to the Horrid Crimes, committed by the eighteen Malefactors therein mention’d, & charg’d, & prov’d upon ’em, as it evidently appears by the sentence of their Condemnation. Whereby I shall endeavour to give you a little insight into the mischievous Vilanies, & contrivances of the Devil, to delude, & undo us utterly; to thinke you with a dread & Horror, & an eternal abomination of Him. The Chief & Principal points, which I Intend to explain to you, in discoursing on this subject, are these here Following. 1. First: Whether the Devil, at any time, has power to appear visibly, either in human, or any Other Shape? 2. Secondly. Whether the Devil can make Men renounce God, & their Baptism? 3. Thirdly. Whether the Devil sometimes causes the Christian Names to be Chang’d, which were given in Baptism? 4. Fourthly. Whether the Devil exacts any Homage or Tribute to be pay’d to him? 5. Fifthly. Whether the Devil Markes Witches & Magicians? 6. Sixthly. Whether Magicians make a Circle, or no? 7. Seventhly. Whether Witches use a staff & Ointment thereby to be transported & Carried thrô the Air, from one place to another? 8. Eighthly. Whether Witches move, & go in the Air, from place to Place? 9. Ninthly. Whether Witches Eat, Drink, & Dance at their Meetings & Rendevouz? 10. Tenthly. Whether Witches worship the Devil, in the Shape of a Goat? 11. Eleventhly. Whether there be Incubi, & Succubi? That is, Whether Devils may have, or have even had carnal communication with Men, & Women, respectively, in human Shape. And now, to give an Answer to Every one of those Query’s, one after tother, in the order that they are ranged in the Sentence of Condemnation: I shall Answer that First, which was first propos’d. Viz: Whether the Devil, at any time, has power to appear Visible, either in a human, or any other Shape? The Words in the Sentence are these: Cacodaemone in humanô Specie Existente. The Devil appearing in a Human Shape; to you. It Appears by this Sentence, C[hristian] A[uditor] that all the 18 Criminals, Mention’d in it, both Men & Women, did agree in this, & that Every one of ’em, by their own Confession, Confirm’d by Oath, did Acknowledge; & by the Testimonies of unexceptionable witnesses, it was

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Evidently prov’d upon ’em, Juridically, & in due form of Law, openly in the Court of Justice, that all, & Every one of ’em, Had Denied Our God, One in Essence, & Three in Persons, the Supreme Maker, & Creator of all things in Being: & had Worship’d the Accursed Devil, the Old Inveterate Enimy of Mankind, & had Given themselves up to him forevermore; & utterly had Renounc’d their most Sacred Baptism, & those that stood Godfathers, & Godmothers for ’em at their Christening; & their share of Heaven, & Eternal inheritance, which our Lord Jesus Christ most mercifully purchased by his Death; Both for them, & all Mankind. And that all this, they had renounc’d, in the Presence of the Devil, Appearing in Human shape to ’em. For Instance; One of the Women Deposed in the Open Court, that Being Extremely Sad, & Melancholicks, one day, & almost distracted, for the loss of a favorite Daughter of Hers, who was taken by Death from her; There appear’d to her, a Man, (as she thought,) all in Black; about 25. or 30. years of age, saying thus to her: I see, Good Woman, that you Mourn, & Grieve Extraordinarily, & are Exceedingly Afflicted, upon some Misfortune or other that has happen’d to you; If you’ll be advised by me, I’ll put you into a way, whereby, you’ll not only free yourself from the present Grief, & sadness, & shagreen, with which you are now oppress’d, but will also give you a great deal of Comfort, happiness, & Content, all the remainder of your days on Earth. &c: Others of ’em depos’d: That at the time of a great Dearth, At the Town of Avignon, & in all the adjacent Country thereabouts, When the Poorer sort of People, were all ready almost to perish by extremity of Want; forced to feed upon wild Hearbs, on horses, on Asses Dung Dry’d, & Boyl’d; or any other Trash that they could meet with, any where that was but Eatable; & had no means left ’em, in the world, to stop the sad & Lamentable Outcryes of their starving \children/ crying after ’em incessantly night & day for a little victuals to sustain ’em,: A Certain Man appear’d to ’em, all in black, seeming to be near the Age, as is abovemention’d; speaking in a familiar manner to ’em, & endeavouring to invite ’em to him, & ingratiate himself with ’em: But most of ’em did declare that at the first, they refused to condescend to the Vilainous proposals which he offerr’d to ’em; but yielded at the second, or at the Third time, after they had A little accustom’d themselves thereto. From hence, I shall take occasion, to make a short digression, before I proceed farther on the subject I am now upon, to speak to you C[hristian] A[uditor] one word or two, of the obligation we all Lye under, of releeving the poor & Indigent, according to our ability, when they beg for a little Charity, & Alms of us, in their necessities, & disconsolation since the Charity that is thus done ’em, may haply sometimes prove no less a Favour to ’em, than the rescuing, or preserving em from the Devil, & their eternal misery. So that, it is not without reason, that the Corporal works of Mercy are

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particularly to be mention’d to us, at the last great day of Vengeance, either to our Salvation, or to our Condemnation, According as we have shown our selves, here in this mortal life, Charitable, or uncharitable, merciful or unmerciful, Compassionate or Pityless to our neighbours in Distress. This gave occasion that that saying of St James; Brethren, If any one Amongst you, shall cause a sinner to be converted from the Error of his way, he shall save that Man’s Soul from death, & shall cover a Multitude of sins. And Indeed, the Apostles were so sensible of this important matter, that, at the first beginning of the Establishment of the Christian Church, recommended by our Redeemer Jesus Christ to their prudent Care & Management, they gave order, that seven Men, Persons of good repute, full of wisdom, & the Holy Ghost, should be chosen, & appointed to relieve, & serve the Poor, & to supply ’em all, with what they might judge necessary, according as Each one of ’em, might want, or stand in need. And besides; as they foresaw, that there would a great Dearth happen in their \own/ days; to prevent the Misfortunes of it, they gave order, for a general Collection to be raised, throughout all the Towns, & Cities, where any Christian Convents were inhabiting, for such charitable alms & succour, as might be requisite, to relieve The Poor & indigent in their necessitous Distresses, during that Calamity. In which Employ, St Paul bestirr’d him with all the diligence & care imaginable, as it evidently appears, by many clear testimonies of his own, in his Epistles to the Corinthians, To the Thessalonians, & to Many other Christians inhabiting in Other Towns; & that Money was sent from those distant Places, to Jerusalem, & Judea, for that Charitable Intent, Where very little was to be had, God knows, for the new Christian Converts, by reason of the desperate Persecutions, The Bloody wars, & the vexatious Garrisons that were appointed over ’em, by the order of the Roman Governours. So that, as it had been foretold of their Preaching Long before, by the Royal Prophet David, that the sound of their Voice should reach to the utmost Bounds of the Earth.; [Latin quotation]: the same might be affirm’d in regard to their Alms & Charity. [Latin quotation]. That their Charitable Alms Extended throughout all the world. By this so memorable, & so glorious an Example of Christian Charity, shewn by the Apostles in the Infancy of Christianity; Constantine the Great, the first Christian Emperour of the East, & several other Emperors & Kings who succeeded after \him/, both in the East, & West, Gave Large possessions & Donations to the Church, & Erected many Hospitals for the Spiritual & Corporal relief & Comfort of sick & Dying Persons. In so much that Julian, Once a Christian Emperor, but afterwards an Apostate, & Idolater, & a very bloody, inhuman, Persecutor & Tyrant; Could not deny, as he himself acknowledg’d, but that it was a pious, & Religious act of Charity; & thereupon gave order, for more Hospitals to be Built, & plentifully endow’d: Scorning (as he said) in this particular, to be out-

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done by Christians. On the Otherside, Poor & indigent People must humbly submit, & patiently resign themselves, to the appointments of God’s adorable Providence, under the necessities, distresses, & Calamities, which he is pleas’d from time to time, to inflict upon ’em. They must not Grumble, mutter, & complain, as many are \too/ apt to do, in their frantic fits, & their passionate, & fretful humours against that God that made ’em, Their Soverain, & Divine Lord, Creatour, & Redeemer, & best of Benefactours to ’em; Their God, their Father, & their Friend, to whom entirely they are beholden, for all they have, & are; & whatever they can hope to \enjoy/ hereafter in heaven & immortal glory. Let ’em Not dare to presume to accuse the \irreproachable/ justice of God, of Partiality in bestowing his Guifts & Blessings upon Men, Temporal or Spiritual; isn’t He the Sovereign Lord of all Created Beings, both in Heaven & on Earth? Is’nt He the Master of all his Heavenly, & Earthly Favours? & Has’nt he an absolute Power in his hands to dispose of ’em just as He thinks fitting? Is’nt his Justice right, & entirely irreproachable in the distribution of his guifts & Blessings? \Let them think what they will/ Quis dicere potest, Cur ita Facis? says the Humble & Patient Job: Where’s the Man so insolent, as to demand of God, Why He dos so & so? Poor People should Consider, that Jesus Christ himself, the Eternal Son of God, & King of all heavenly Glory, most graciously condescended to become poor in the world like them, to teach ’em, for his sake, patiently to endure, whatever trials, Crosses, inconveniences, or necessities they are like to meet with on this side the grave, & are incident unavoidably to the state of this mortal Life: Especially since the Almighty so graciously, so kindly, & so providentially has Order’d it, that if they will but make that benifit & advantage of ’em, as they may, & ought to doe, by bearing ’em with submission, & an invincible Christian Patience, they may purchase a Crown of Glory by ’em, in the Other world, Eternal, & Immortal. Let ’em tell me, w[hi] ch of ’em is so needy, so necessitous, so Afflicted as poor Lazarus was: The scripture tells us, that he was a beggar, & a very despicable poor wretch; that he was full of sores, & ulcers; that He lay begging at the gate of a rich Man, who was cloth’d in silk, & purple, & \who/ feasted Every day in a most splendid, & sumptuous manner; whilst He, poor miserable creature, Lay starving at His door, earnestly importuning him But for a few scraps or bits, that fell, or were carried off from his table, or given to the Dogs; but was churlishly refus’d, alas! even so small a favour. Tis true, the Dogs, showing more pity to him, & a greater compassion of him, went to him, & lick’d his sores: & that was all the Charity, which the Scripture mentions, that He receiv’d. But let such who are in affliction, or in extremity of want, & poverty, observe what follow’d after. And it came to pass, continues the Evangelist, That the poor beggar dyed, & was carried instantly by Angels into Abraham’s bosom. And the Rich Man

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also died, & was buried in Hell. Let poor folks, I say, consider but a little attentively, & seriously observe the End both of one & tother; & I need say no more, either to advise ’em, or to Exhort ’em what they ought to doe; nor in what manner it becomes ’em, to behave themselves in their daily wants, & their calamitous distresses. But what am I doing? to run so wide, & make so long & tedious a digression from my present purpose? To return then, C[hristian] A[uditor] to the subject again, which I at first engag’d to discourse upon, & entertain you with this day. As to what has been affirm’d concerning the Devil’s Appearing in a visible, & Human shape, to several Persons, here upon the Earth; no one can wonder at it, nor think it strange or odd: tis what certainly he has done upon many occasions; as may evidently be prov’d, by testimonies, that are undeniable; both from Holy Scriptures, & from other Authentick Histories, that are very warrantable, & utterly incontestable. St Matthew in the 4th Chapter of his Gospel, tells us, that Our Blessed Redeemer Jesus Christ was led by the Spirit, (Meaning his Divine Spirit or Impulse of the Holy Ghost) into the Desert, (that is, into a true solitary Wilderness; For St Mark says, He was with Beasts;) to be Tempted by the Devil. That, when He had Fasted 40 days, & 40 Nights he was afterwards Hungry. And that the Tempter Coming said to Him: If Thou art the Son of God, Command that these Stones be turn’d into Bread. Who made Answer; It is Written: Man lives not by Bread only, but by Every word that proceeds from the Mouth of God. Then the Devil took Him up, into the Holy City, & set him on the Pinacle of the Temple, and said to Him: If Thou be the Son of God, Cast thy self down: for it is written; that He has given his Angels charge of Thee: & they shall bear Thee up in their hands, Least perhaps thou hurt thy foot against a Stone. Jesus said to him, it is also written, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God. Again the divel took him up unto a very high Mountain, & Shew’d him all the Kingdoms of the World, & their Glory, & He said to Him; All these will I give Thee, if falling down, Thou wilt adore me. Then Jesus saith to him: Satan begone: For it is Written: The Lord thy God, thou shalt adore, & Him only shalt thou serve. At this, the Devil Left him. And Behold the Angels came, & Ministred to Him. Thus far st Matthew. Theophilactus, & other Interpreters of the Holy Gospels, expound this Text above, in regard to the Devil’s coming to Tempt our Saviour; that he then appear’d to him, in a humane, & Bodily shape, just like a Man; & when tis said that the Devil took him into the holy City, & set him on the Pinacle of the Temple. If we ask in wt Manner this was done, St Gregory Answers, that Christ might permit himself to be taken up, & transported in the Air, by the Devil; He that afterwards permitted Himself to be tormented, & nailed to a Cross by Wicked Men, Who are Members of the Devil. Others are of Opinion, that the Devil only conducted Him

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from place to place. & The Text, in St Luke’s Gospel, seems to favour this Exposition, where it is said, that the Devil Led Him to Jerusalem to a high Mountain &c: And when the Devil left him, the Evangelist says, that Angels came & Ministred to Him. It is very likely that the Angels, here mention’d, came to him in a visible Manner, to wait on Him, & to bring Him something to eat, to satisffie his Hunger: Who, to Convince us of his Humane Nature, & Condition, (which after being miraculously supported, without taking any sustenance for 40 Days, & Nights, as Moses & Elias formerly had been,) was now permitted to suffer Hunger & Thirst. And indeed, the very first words which were spoken by the Devil to our Blessed Redeemer on this occasion, were these; [Latin quotation]: If Thou art the Son of God, Command these stones to be turn’d into Bread. Which cannot but imply, that either he took up then, some stones, & shew’d ’em to him; or pointed to some stones which were Lying on the Ground before him. As for the Appearing of good Angels in a humane shape, There are so many Instances in the Holy Scriptures, both old, & New, that clearly prove it, & very evidently evince it, that no manner of difficulty can be made, by any one, who is a Christian, as to the belief of it; Devils, it is certain, are nothing else, but revolted & Apostat Angels, and as such; thô Rebels, & Fallen from the happy state of Grace & Glory which eternally they might have enjoy’d, if they had not revolted; yet still retain that natural, & Spiritual Power, which was given ’em by their Creator, as far as it pleases God to allow it, & permit it, & ever & anon to shew it, \by appearing in a human shape/ visibly upon Earth to Men, when he thinks it proper. & Innumerable Examples might be produc’d here of, evidently to prove it, both before, & after the Coming of our Saviour to redeem the World, if my time would but allow it. It is recorded in the Book of Exodus, that Sorcerers & Magicians by their witchcraft & inchantments, & by the slight, & assistance & delusion of the Devil, God so permitting it, turn’d Rods into Serpents, Produc’d a great number of Froggs, & turn’d water into Blood, & perform’d other strange & surprising wonders, in the Presence of King Pharaoh, & all the People of Egypt. And if so, what wonder is it, if Devils sometimes appear to us here on Earth visibly in a human shape, by the same Divine permission. In this manner, St John Chrysostome seems to think, He visibly appear’d to Job, during the time that God permitted him, to afflict him, & molest him. And that the Messengers, who came to bring him news of his calamitous misfortunes, so suddenly one after tother, as they did, were not really Men, but Devils, in Men’s disguise. For otherwise it cannot be well imagined, How a Man, being in a House, which fell down on a sudden, & was utterly demolish’d in an instant, possibly could escape from being buried in the ruines. Nor, how those Losses & Calamities happening at so far a distance one from tother, (as the Sheep which were consum’d

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by a fire that fell from heaven; The Camels that were taken, & driven away by the Chaldeans; The House which was overthrown & instantly demolish’d) could be all so exactly timed in the reports that were given of ’em, that as soon as one had deliver’d his unwelcome news, another should come running immediatly at his heels, to acquaint the patient sufferer of what other losses & misfortunes he had sustain’d in other places. And since the Devil had free liberty given to him, by God’s permission, not only to destroy the sheep, but also but also the Shepheards too; & not only to overwhelm the house, but also to involve all those who were then within it, in the rubbish, & ruines of it, it is not at all likely, that he who is so bloody-minded, such a roaring Lion, such a ravenous Wolf, such an inveterate, & mortal Enimy to mankind, running about continually, as the Apostle says, seeking whom he may devour, would suffer any one of them to escape to bring the news to Job, of these disasters & Calamities: especially since twas in his power, as well to deliver the tidings thereof himself, as to cause the Murders, & do the Mischiefs that were done, by the Divine permission, to that patient sufferer: Particularly since he had full Leave given him to do what he would to him, so that he spared his life, & did not murder him downright. Tantum, ne tangas animam eius, (says Almighty God) This only is forbidden thee, not to attempt his Life. So that the tidings of these disasters happening one after tother, being the most vexatious, the most afflicting, the most desperate of all Job’s Tryals, It cannot be absurd, but very reasonable to think, that the Devil was the bringer of ’em: nor dos the Scripture make the least mention of any one that escaped, but only that He who brought Job the news, of all the Losses, & Crosses above mention’d, say’d so, & so, to him. St Austin dos not only say, that possibly this might be so, but also gives the reason why it probably was so; And this, by the application of some natural causes; by which the Devil can shape to himself, when he so pleases, &God permits it, what body soever he desires to assume, especially in regard of the quantity, & quality thereof, which are meerly accidents. And Such a Body as this, says St Austin, the Devil can move about as he will, from place to place, by a kind of Local motion; yet doth not, nor cannot give life to it, nor operate in it, as the reasonable Soul dos in a human Body he has assum’d; for the Body he has thus assum’d, is not a live Body, animated by a spiritual Soul, as all other living Bodies are, but is only somewhat of an aerial substance, cloth’d with outside accidents, & seeming to the beholders to have life in it, by the secret working of the Devil; just as the Heavenly sphears, & Sun, & Moon, & stars above, are turn’d about, & regulated in their constant motions Day & night, by the ministry of Angels, and yet those celestial spheres, & Sun, & Moon, & Stars, are not thought, nor cannot properly be said to be alive. Diabolus

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aptat sibi Corpus aliquod tanquam vestem. says St Austin. the Devil fits, or forms to himself a Body, as a Person shapes to himself a suit of Cloths. In this manner he often visibly appear’d to St Anthony in the desert, as St Athanasius reports in the history of his life; & in this same manner he also visibly shew’d himself to St Martin Bishop of Tours, upon his deathbed, as Severus Sulpitius informs us. And indeed, There is hardly any Father of the Christian Church ever yet denied either the possibility, or the reallity of the matter. To conclude, the Angelical Doctor of the Church, St Thomas of Aquine, one of the most Learned Divines that ever illustrated the Christian Church, positively has declar’d the truth of this assertion, in the words which are following: [Latin quotation]. The Devil can form a Body of Air, of whatsoever shape, & Figure He has a mind, that assuming it, he may visibly appear in it. By which words of this celebrated Divine, it plainly appears, as well as by the other proofs which were alledg’d above, & many more which I could produce, if occasion did require it, that Devils can appear here upon earth amongst us, not only visibly in a human shape like Men, or Women, but also in any other form or shape they please, if God permits it. Of Witches & Witchcraft And the Fatal Mischiefs w[hi]ch are acted in the World by the Delusions of the Devil. The Second Discours. Annotations On the Second Query. Whether the Devil has Power to make Men Renounce God, & Their Baptism? I Intend to Day, C[hristian] A[uditor] According to my Promise, which I engag’d to you, some time ago; to go on where I left off, in giving you an Account of the Fatal Vilanies & Mischiefs, which are frequently acted in the World, by the hellish Contrivances & Delusions of the Devil to undo Mankind, & Ruin ’em forevermore. I have already given an Answer, in my first Discours upon this Subject, To the First Question that was propos’d; Viz: Whether the Devil at any time has power to appear visibly upon Earth amongst us, either in a humane, or any other Shape. I shall now proceed to Answer the Second Query, Which was this: Whether the Devil has Power to make Men Renounce God, & their Baptism? The Sentence Aforemention’d, in my First Discours upon the Subject I am now upon, pronounc’d at Avignon in France, some years ago, against 18 Criminals, that were there arraign’d, Convicted, & Condemn’d for Witchcraft, & Dealing with the Devil; plainly Shews, that all, & Every one of ’em, had utterly denied God, & Renounc’d their most Sacred Baptism.

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The Words in the Sentence are these: – [Latin quotation]. It has clearly been made out, & it appears plain, & Evident to us, that you all, & Every one of you have denied our God, One in Essence, & Three in Persons, the supreme Maker, & Creator of all things in Being, & utterly have renounc’d your most Sacred Baptism; [Latin quotation]. &c: & also those who stood for you Godfathers, & Godmothers at your Christening. &c: It is an ordinary contrivance, & a Common practice of the Devil; C[hristian] A[uditor] To endeavour all he can to perswade Men to renounce & Deny their God \& Every thing relating to Religion, & the Worship of him/. He is the chief Author, & promoter of all the Heresies, that ever were in the World, since the time that God created it. And among many others of his Pernicious Inventions to damn Mankind, He mischievously brought in the Belief, & Worship, of many false Gods, or Idols; & perswaded The deluded People, to offer Sacrifices, & pay divine Honour to ’em.Tis for this intent, that some he has prevail’d with to become downright Atheists, to believe that there is no God \at all/: Others He has perswaded to become Deists; to Believe indeed that there is a God, a Providence, Vertues & Vices, The Immortality of the Soul, & Rewards, & Punishments after Death; but to believe nothing of any reveal’d Religion. Others He has taught to turn Arians, & Socinians, to deny the Son of God to be coequal, Coeternal, & Consubstantial to the Father; & consequently to disbelieve the ever Blessed, & undivided Trinity. Others he perswaded to turn Macedonians, Who held, that the Holy Ghost was neither like the Father, nor the Son, but a meer Creature, & one of God’s Ministers, being notwithstanding more excellent than any Angel. Thus he has stirr’d up innumerable Hereticks, & has spread up & down the World an Infinity of Errors from time to time, in all ages past, to discredit the belief in one true & everliving God, one in Essence, & Three in Persons, & by such false Notions to Confound, & utterly abolish in the world, all Principles of the True Religion, establish’d by Jesus Christ: thereby to usurp the better, & invade the Glory of God, & make himself be worshipp’d, & adored as a God by Men, with a greater facility: Still holding to his First arrogant pretension, & persisting in the same diabolical presumption, as formerly at his revolt, when he said in his proud heart, [Latin quotation]. I’ll be like unto the most High. And \ indeed/ those words in the Sentence above rehears’d, very clearly evince the truth hereof; [Latin quotation]: It has clearly been made out, & it appears plain & Evident to us, that you all, & Every one of you, (meaning the 18 Criminals then standing at the Bar arraign’d) have denied our God, One in Essence, & Three in Persons, the Supreme Maker, & Creator of all things in Being, & have Worshipp’d the Accursed Devil, the inveterate Enimy of Mankind, & have given yourselves up to him forevermore. &c: You may see by this, C[hristian] A[uditor] The Devil’s main design, what is his chief drift, & what he would be at; First to make us deny, & renounce

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our God, The Soveraign & Divine Creator & Redeemer of Mankind; to whom all worship & adoration is most justly, & only due: & then to prevaile with us, to own, & acknowledge, & worship, & Adore him, as our True & Only God. To prevent this Danger, & to frustrate this Design of the \Infernal/ Enimy, so fatal to Mankind; The Holy Church, a most tender & Careful Mother to all Faithful Christians upon Earth, has given express Orders to all Her Priests, & Bishops, (To whom alone, the Solemn administration of all the Sacraments, by God’s appointment, & their sacred Function, principally dos belong;) that whensoever they administer the holy Sacrament of Baptism to any Infant, They shall first exorcise the Child, before they Christen him, In the words here following: – “I conjure thee, O unclean spirit! In the Name of the Father + & of the Son. + & of the Holy Ghost. + that Thou go Forth, & Depart from this Servant of God. N. for tis He that Commands thee, Cursed Damn’d Wretch, Who walk’d Dry-shod on the sea, & stretch’d forth his right hand to Peter who was sinking: Therefore Cursed Devil, acknowledge the sentence thou Lyest under; & give honour to the True, & ever Living God; Give Honour to Jesus Christ His Son; & to the Holy Ghost; & Depart from this Servant of God; N: Because God & our Lord Jesus Christ has voutchsafed to call him to his holy Grace & Blessing, & to the Font of Baptism.” And then, making the Sign of the Cross \w[i]th his Thumb/ on the Forehead of the Infant; He adds: – “& this sign of the Holy + Cross which we stamp upon his Forehead, Thou Cursed Devil, never dare to violate. Thrô the same Christ our Lord. Amen.” After this, The Priest, by order of the Church, Puts the following Questions to the Party he is to Christen, calling him by his Name: “N. Dost Thou Renounce the Devil?” The Party, if grown up to the years of reason & discretion, answers for himself: But if he be an Infant; His Godfather, or God-Mother who stands for him, answers in his name, “I do renounce Him.” The Priest demands again. “Dost Thou Renounce all his works?” It is Answer’d as before: I do renounce them. The Priest askes a third Time: “Dost Thou Renounce all his Pomps?” It is answer’d a third time. “I do renounce ’em.” The Priest then puts 3 Other Questions to him Concerning his Belief in God, & some other of the main Articles contain’d in the Apostles Creed: calling him by his name, & demanding thus of him. “N: Dost Thou believe in God the Father Almighty Creator of Heaven & Earth?” It is Answer’d by the God-father, or God-mother Who stands for him, in his name. “I Do Believe.” The Priest demands again. “Dost thou Believe in Jesus Christ, His only Son our Lord, Who was Born, & Suffer’d for thee?” The Goships1 Answering for the Child, Reply. “I Do Believe.” 1

  That is, godparents.

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The Priest Askes a third time. “Dost thou believe in the Holy Ghost, The Holy Catholick Church, The Communion of Saints, The Forgiveness of Sins, the Resurrection of the Body, & Life Everlasting?” The Goships Answer for him. “I Do Believe.” These C[hristian] A[uditor] These are what are call’d our Baptismal Vows; These are the Solemn promises which are made for us, & in our Name, By our God-fathers & God-mothers, who are Sureties for us at our Christening, in our most tender Infancy; such Promises, such Vows, to the performance of which, Both You & I, & All Christians stand engaged, & are stricktly, & severely bound \to/ upon pain of our Damnation to our last expiring breath. The Devil, & all his works, & Pomps, we must utterly renounce; In One only true, & everliving God we must stedfastly believe; One in Essence, & Three in Persons; Father, Son, & Holy Ghost. Him only \we/ must acknowledg, & serve, & worship, & Adore as the Divine Creator of Heaven & Earth, & the Sovereign Lord of all things. The Incarnation, & Crucifixion, of our Redeemer Jesus Christ we must firmly hold; & of all the Other Articles Contain’d in the Three Creeds, & the Profession of the Holy, Catholick, & Apostolick Faith, we must inviolably maintain, or we must never hope for heaven, & Everlasting Bliss. Wherefore, St Austin makes this Observation, That the Devil’s Chief\ est/ aim, & his greatest desire is, & that he is ambitious of nothing more, than to see Men pay that Worship & Adoration to him, which they are forbid to offer to any one but God alone. [Latin quotation]. The Devils, says he, rejoice to see divine honours shewn ’em. But this is what they cannot force, or Compel Christians by any violent means to do; Tis what, they are aware, is quite beyond their Power, & what God never dos, nor never will permit: This puts ’em upon other crafty shifts, & forces ’em to go some other way to work, to bring their design about. They are sensible, that tis Impossible ever to effect it, utterly in vain even to attempt it, unless by their sly Temptations, or some other false delusions, they can inveigle us in, freely to consent to disbelieve the Trinity. Knowing very well, that a true Belief of the Ever Blessed Trinity, is a Motive powerful & strong enough, instantly to put a stop to all Idolatry, & Devil-Worship: For we Believe by that, a Unity in a Trinity, & a Trinity in a Unity; that is to say in plainer words, We Believe one only God, in Three Divine Persons; & Three Divine Persons in one only God, to be served, & Honour’d, & worship’d & Ador’d by Men, as their only true, & ever-living God, the Soveraign Lord & God of all created Beings, either in heaven or on Earth. A Belief, which when once we are well instructed in, nothing in the world can ever Byass us, nothing can prevail upon us, to worship or acknowledg any thing for God, but the Father, The Son, & the Holy Ghost alone; For our Faith is limited to these three Sacred Persons, & consequently exclude all other things whatsoever, in regard that they

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are as much inferior to these three Divine Persons, as the vilest Creature, is to the Supreme Creator. And Therefore Basilides, & his Followers, Who imagined a Ridiculous Series of Gods, Proceeding from one another, & from the Angels, who they fancy’d created each one of ’em a heaven; & made a number of these heavens to amount to 365 to answer the number of days, in the revolution of a year; & had many other odd Notions, & absurd opinions, Concerning The Son of God; These Ridiculous Hereticks, I say, must first have lost undoubtedly all Belief of the ever blessed, & undivided Trinity, before they could give admittance to such a multitude of Gods, as they believ’d to be. The like may be affirm’d of the Arrians, & Sabellians, who were violent sticklers against the Trinity, in former ages; & also the Socinians, Free-thinkers, & Latitudinarians, who swarm up & down this kingdom, in the days that we live in. Hence it follows. Christian Auditors, that never any Devil, nor any other Creature whatsoever, ever can be worshipp’d by a Christian, unless he first abandon, & renounce his Faith of the ever blessed Trinity. So that, tis no wonder, that the Devil exacts this, the first thing he dos, of all Christians that resort to his Synagogues, & Rendevous; For if he should doe Otherwise, He could have no manner of Pretence to gain them over to him. Hereupon we may observe, that there can scarce be found any Heresy that has been, if narrowly search’d into, & thoroughly examin’d, which exactly has retain’d a full & entire belief, of the Ever Blessed Trinity. Nay some Incredulous Miscreants there have been, & too many alass! there are, at this very \day/ in this unhappy kingdom, so insolently Bold, as openly & barefaced, to make a mockery, & a mere banter of it; passing ever & anon, in a sporting way, some witty joke, upon it, to divert the Company, & valuing it no More than a meer Chimera, or a whimsical Conceit framed in the Brain of Man. And so doing, by necessity it must follow, that they must renounce their Baptism, which is administred to ’em, in their Infancy, in the name of the Blessed Trinity. Next to the disowning of the most sacred Trinity, the Devil’s chiefest aim, is to induce is, all he can, to disown & Renounce our Baptism: which is one of the Main obstacles to his mischievous designs, & one of the greatest objects of his Spight & revenge against us; finding by that Sacrament, his hellish power, & malice much weaken’d, & disable’d from doing us any mischief; & He himself in Person vilified, expell’d & scorn’d with the utmost contempt by us; Call’d by the disgraceful, & ignominious names therein, of unclean Spirit, a Cursed Damn’d Wretch, a Cursed Devil & Commanded by the Priest that Christens us, in the name, & by the Power of \God/ committed to him, Instantly to be gone from us, & give place to the Holy Ghost. Exorcised & Conjured in the Name of the Father, & Of the Son, & of the Holy Ghost, to go forth, & depart immediately. That tis He that commands him, who walk’d dry-shod on the Sea. Commanded

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to acknowledg the Sentence he lyes under; & give honour to the True & Ever-living God; to give honour to Jesus Christ his Son, & to the Holy Ghost, & Depart from us without delay. & the Sign of the \holy/ Cross stamp’d upon our Foreheads at our Baptism, he is severely warn’d never to presume to violate. Infine, the Infant who is Christen’d, The Baptismal water, The Salt, & the Holy Oyles, are all Exorcis’d & Bless’d; & nothing used in Baptism, but what is Bless’d & sanctified, the Better to preserve us, & protect us from the Malice of \this/ our Infernal Enimy. \so that/ Every thing in Baptism warns us to have nothing to do with him; & Every thing debars him, from having anithing to do with us; thus entirely to cut off, by all means possible, all manner of Communication between him & us. By what has been Affirm’d in answer to this second Query; It may easily be discern’d, C[hristian] A[uditor] why the Devil conceives such a mortal hatred & Aversion against God, & the Blessed Trinity, & the Holy Sacrament of our Baptism, & why he exacts the Abandoning & Renouncing of ’em, of all Christians, that resort to his synagogues, & Rendvous of Witches, the first thing He dos. I shall therefore now proceed to the Third Query, to examine Whether The Devil Causes the Christen names to be Chang’d which were given in Baptism. The Third Annotation. The Words in the Sentence are these: – [Latin quotation]. The Roaring Devil himself pouring again other water on you, which you receiv’d; Changing your true Christen Name, which had been given to you before, at the sacred Font of Baptism; And thus you have suffer’d another feign’d Name to be impos’d upon you, & accordingly have accepted of it. [Latin quotation]. And this you have done, says that Sentence, after you had renounced your Baptism, & those who stood Godfathers & Godmothers for you, at it. In discoursing upon this Point, C[hristian] A[uditor], I shall take Occasion, from these words of the Sentence above rehears’d, to give Parents one word or two of Prudent & good advice, to instruct ’em, & Direct ’em, what methods they ought to take, in the Christening of their Children, which, from time to time God is pleas’d to bless ’em with. Two things there are, that ought prudently to be consider’d, & very carefully observ’d in it. First, to take due care, to have such Names given to their Children at their baptism, which may put ’em ever & anon in mind, that they are Christians; & as such, have solemnly promis’d, & engaged both living & dying, utterly to renounce the Devil, & all his Works, & Pomps; & firmly to believe in Jesus Christ, & Love, & serve, & worship, & adore him, as the only True & everlasting God. And secondly, to provide for ’em such God-fathers, & God-mothers, as are in good repute, prudent, Devout, stanch, & Virtuous Christians. For since the Devil is not contented to make men barely quit & renounce their Baptism, but will have ’em

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also renounce their God-fathers, & their God-mothers, who answer’d, & engag’d for ’em; & is so desirous to have ’em change the name, which was given ’em in Baptism; tis a certain sign, that these are things he cannot abide, & extremely offensive to him. Tis true, In the Jewish Law of old, There was no such thing as Baptism ever heard of, or Commanded by God Almighty to be observ’d by his People then; but, if we will observe, They had even then a law of Circumcision, answering & resembling in many things the sacrament of our Infant-Baptism amongst Christians nowadays. For in Circumcision, Which, by express order from God, was Commanded to be perform’d on the 8th day after Birth; The Ancient fathers of the Jews gave their Children Names upon that Day, as appears in the Gospel of St Luke by the Circumcision of Jesus Christ, & that of St John the Baptist. So that, even then, they were entirely deliver’d from the Power of the Devil, inroll’d in the number of the Children of Benediction, & listed to serve & Fight under the Command of the true & only God, against the Common Enimy both of Him, & all Mankind. Nay, even among the very Pagans, & the very Gentiles \themselves, People/ who knew nothing of Circumcision, nothing of Christian Baptism, nothing of the True God; Heathens, Idolaters, & Infidels as they were; it was a common Custom, as St Jerom has observ’d, at least among such of ’em, who lived morally well, according to the light of Nature, & the Common law of Reason, & good sense; not to impose names at random upon their Children, such as were trivial, or frivolous, or idle, or insignificant, but rather made Choice of such sort of names for ’em, which betoken’d, & imply’d some kind of virtue or other, to which they were desirous to dedicate & appropriate ’em; & thus to stand to ’em, all their lifetime, as a perpetual memorandum, to admonish ’em to live conformably to the signification of the Names they bore. Thus we find Many of ’em, who have been call’d by the Name of Victor, a Conqueror; Castus. Chast. Probus. Honest. Pius. Devout. Sophronius. Prudent. Eusebius. Virtuous. Theophilus. A lover of God. &c: & this among the Heathens, & the very Infidels themselves. Moreover tis observ’d that in the Jewish Law of old, it was customary to Fathers in giving their Children Names, frequently to add to ’em some other appellation that was appropriated to God. For Example. El. Was one of the Proper Names of God. It signifies in hebrew, force, or Strength, or Power. Many Hebrew Names are Compounded of it. As. Eleazar. Which signifies, The Help of God. Elcana. Jealous God. Elizabeth. God of Oaths. Emmanuel. God with us. Gabriel. The Strength of God. Raphael. The Medicine of God. &c: Commonly they retain’d the Name of some one of their Ancestors, either illustrious for their Sanctity, or renowned for their Charity, or conspicuous for their Prudence, or celebrated for their Chastity;

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or Exemplar for other vertues; Thus to set before their Children a Constant Pattern of some Vertue for them to imitate. And for this reason ’twas, as we have reason to imagine, that those who were present at the Circumcision of St John Baptist, Wonder’d why his Parents should give to him the Name of John, Since there was never any one of that Ancient & Illustrious Family, who was ever so call’d: Which evidently, & plainly shews, that they more religiously retain’d the Names of their good old Ancestors, than they did the rich inheritance, which they entail’d upon ’em. Hereupon St Chrysostome, Patriarch of Constantinople, & one of the most illustrious Fathers of the Greek Church, in a Sermon w[hi]ch he preach’d to the People of that City, earnestly recommended to ’em, this, as a Constant Rule; never to give any Name, to any one of their Children, but the Name of some Saint or Other: & at the same time, exhorted & advised the Children, such who were grown up to the years of reason, & discretion, inviolably to retain the Name, which was given ’em in \their/ Baptism, & never suffer it to be alter’d for any Other, upon any Account soever. He bid ’em do, as Joseph the old Patriarch Did, Who notwithstanding Pharaoh, then King of Egypt, had chang’d his Name, after the Egyptian manner, into somewhat else, after the custome in that Country; yet still kept, & constantly retain’d his first Name Joseph, given him by his Father, Jacob, to his dying day. As appears by those kind words of his, when he discover’d who he was, to his unnatural, & inhumane Brothers. [Latin quotation]. I am Joseph your Brother. And indeed the Holy Scripture never calls him by any other Name, than Joseph; Not ever mentioning that Other Name, which King Pharaoh had imposed upon him. The Prophet Daniel, & his three Companions, Ananias, Azarias, & Misael, the Scripture tells us, did the very same. For thô Nabuchodonosor had order’d Daniel to be call’d by the Chaldean Name of Balthasar, & his Other three Companions, by the Names of Sidrac, Misach, & Abdenago, Yet when Daniel wrote his Book, which has ever been accounted by the Holy Church to be Canonical, he always stile’s himself therein, Ego Daniel. I Daniel. As likewise his three Companions did; who being thrown into a fiery Furnace, by order of Nabuchodonosor, King of Babylon, cryed out in the Middle of the Flames, [Latin quotation]. Ananias, Azarias, Misael, Bless ye our Lord: Nor did they ever acknowledg any other Names they had, But these names only which were given ’em in Judea. This gave occasion to St Chrysostome to affirm what he did, that Christen Names of Saints, which were given to Christian Children, by their Parents at their Baptism, were to put ’em in mind continually to imitate those holy Saints whose holy names they bore. For if, says that holy Prelate, they do not Imitate such, or such a Saint, whose holy Name they bare; & who particularly is appointed by their Parents, & the Divine Providence to be a Patron to ’em, as long as they are to live on Earth; They may assure themselves, that the prayers & merits

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of that Saint, shall not at all avail ’em, towards their Eternal happiness, or Salvation, in the other world. Whereas, o’the Contrary, if they Constantly retain the Name which was given ’em in their Baptism, a Name, (as the usual custom of Christians is) taken from some Saint or Other, inroll’d by the Holy Church in the Catalogue of the Saints; Such a name-sake Saint undoubtedly, will not faile to shew a particular regard for ’em, & will be ready in all Dangers, distresses, & Calamities, either of soul, or Body, To comfort ’em, to assist ’em, to Protect ’em & Defend ’em from all harm, if humbly, & earnestly invoked, by his powerful intercessions to God on their Behalf. I might here, If I thought it proper, say a great deal, against Protestant Baptism, & such Catholick Parents who condescend to have their Children Christen’d in that Manner; & also of the Fatal Consequences that are usually occasion’d by it. But at present, I shall say nothing of it, but shall only leave it to your own selves, to judg, how far inconsistent it is, if well examin’d into, with the Principles of the Catholick Religion, which you embrace; & How far it may expose both the Guilty Parents, & the Poor Innocent Infants to the Danger of Eternal Misery. I Shall now proceed to give an Answer to the Fourth Query, which is this: Whether the Devil Exacts any Homage or Tribute to be Pay’d to him? The Fourth Annotation. The Words in the Sentence are these: – [Latin quotation]. In English Thus: – And for a Pledge of your Fidelity to the Devil, you have given him a little piece, or scantling of your Cloths: And that the Father of Lyes might Effectually take care to have you struck out of the Book of Life, & utterly effaced out of it, At his Order & Command, you have set your Names down, with your own hand, in a dismal Black Book, prepared for that purpose, as a Catalogue of the Reprobate, of the Damn’d, & of Everlasting Death : – Tis certain, Christian Auditors, that the Devil has no need of anything that we possess in this world: Our Faith indeed in God, & the ever blessed Trinity; & God’s Holy & sanctifying Grace, w[hi] ch is infused into our Souls; He would fain deprive us of, if Possible; to involve us by that Means in his own miserable Damnation; But he wants nothing else, He desires nothing else, that we have here belonging to us. Yet because, as I alledg’d before, out of St Austin, that the Devil rejoyces to see Homage pay’d him, as a God, by Men; He is willing such poor Blind wretches, whom he has unhappily by his delusions gain’d over to him, should present him, in token of their acknowledgment, some thing or Other; thô but a small piece, or scantling of their cloths. He exacts this from these poor unfortunate deluded People, who commonly have nothing dearer to ’em, of the little they here possess, than their wearing apparel. & therefore, God in the old Law, stricktly dos forbid, that any one should take a poor Man’s Cloths in pawn; & in case He thus should take ’em, he commands ’em to be restored again to the owner before sunset, otherwise

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He threatens vengeance to such a person. Thus we see the accursed Devil gets ’em to offer to him the best of what they have: for of all the goods of Fortune, he desires Men’s Cloths; of all the gifts of nature, He craves Men’s Children; & of all the gifts of Grace & Spiritual Blessings, he would have their Faith & Baptism. Sometimes, we find, he requires the Blood of Men, as appears by the Heathenish Priests of Baal. Who when they pray’d that fire might descend from Heaven, were used to cut & slash their flesh with Lances. But by reason Men abhorr’d such a Bloody & unnatural Mangling of themselves, He contented himself afterwards With men’s goods, such as wearing apparel; Obliquely perhaps designing by that kind of tribute, to be acknowledg’d for a King. For twas the Custom of the Jews, when they would make or proclaim a King, to put off their upper garment, & spread it on the ground, for him to tread upon as he Pass’d along: As we see in the History of Iehu; & in the Relation of the Triumphant Entry of our Saviour into Jerusalem, a few days before his Passion. Nor did this alone, it seems, suffice, to satisfy the Accursed Devil: but to have those, who have devoted themselves to him, more effectually struck out, & utterly effaced out of the book of life; The sentence declares to us, that by his Command, they are all obliged to set their Names down, with theirown hand, in a dismal Black Book, prepared for that purpose, as a catalogue of the Damn’d & Reprobate. The Next Query is, Whether the Devil Marks Witches & Magicians? The Fifth Annotation. The Words in the Sentence are these: – [Latin quotation]. In English thus: – And that He might have you faster, & more closely bound to him, for so horrid a perfidiousness, & so abominable an impiety, he has stigmatiz’d every one of you, with a Mark or brand, as things solely, & properly appertaining to himself. This very point alone is sufficient to convince all such, who are so foolish to fancy that these things are nothing but silly Whims, of the Errour they are in, For experience plainly proves, & evidently dos demonstrate, that those kind of Marks, which the Devil Makes on all Witches, & Magicians, & which often have been found upon search & examination on some part or other of their Bodies, is Leprous, & void of all sense of feeling; insomuch, that if any one secretly thrust a pin up to the head of it, into the places which are thus Mark’d, they feel no more of it, than if they were downright Lepers. This, the Authour himself, out of whom I have taken this whole account, testifyes, that with pins & needles he has often tryed, & found to be real truth; & not only that; but should any one thrust as many pins or needles as he pleases, into the parts thus mark’d, He may be sure, he says, that he shall not draw one drop of Blood out of ’em. Now, this practice of the Devil, of Marking Witches, is certainly very Ancient; thô several alterations there have been in it, from time to

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time, according as he thought proper. Tertullian, a celebrated Authour, in the most early days of Christianity, tells us, that as God has Commanded such who appartain to him, inwardly to be marked by an indelible Stamp or Character in Baptism, inherent in their Souls forever; & he has order’d an External Mark to be set upon ’em, by the sign of the Holy Cross, & Chrism; In like manner, says Tertullian, The Devil stamps on the Souls of such, who have deliver’d themselves up to him, the inward Brand of a Sin hardly ever to be Effaced, & likewise an outward Mark upon their Body, which they retain to the longest day they live. Though tis possible, & very probable, He tells us, that the Mark he sets upon ’em, may not be the same now, as in former ages past; For tis the Devil’s property, he says, to invent new contrivances & devices every day to delude poor unhappy Mortals. St John Informs us in the Revelations, that at the world’s end, a certain kind of People there will be, who shall bear the Mark or Character of the Beast, either in their forehead or their Hand; which cannot but be understood in a litteral sense, as the very Text it self sufficiently dos imply. And thô there were no other proof but this to convince us of it, Yet this alone may sufficiently evince to us, that both this, & the like Texts, are thus litterally to be expounded. This makes good those words, of St Hypolytus, a very Antient Martyr in the first Ages of Christianity, who, in a Sermon which he preach’d of the last End of the world, speaking of the Devil, who would then take an Imaginary Body on him; says thus: [Latin quotation]. He will bring those, (meaning such as are his followers) to worship & Adore him; & those \who/ will consent to be subject to him, He will set his Mark upon ’em. Words, that one \may/ really imagine, those unhappy deluded Wretches, Condemn’d at Avignon, in France, abovemention’d, had either read or heard of, so aptly their depositions to agree in this particular, with the Predictions of that Holy Martyr. I shall here conclude my second Discours upon this subject, whereby I have given you some few remarks on this five first Points which I engaged to explain to you; May Answer to the six other Queryes yet remaining, I shall reserve for the subject of another Discours, at some other Convenient opportunity. Of Witches & Witchcraft And the Fatal Mischiefs which are Acted in the World by the Delusions of the Devil. The Third Discours. Annotations. On the Sixth Query. Whether Magicians make a Circle or no? I shall take this opportunity, C[hristian] A[uditor] to give you my Third, & Last Discours upon the Subject of Witchcraft, & the Fatal Mischiefs which are acted frequently up & down the World, by the Hellish Contrivances, & Dangerous Delusions of the Devil, The Sworn, & Inveterate Enimy both to God, & all Mankind. I have already given you some few Remarks, on the subject of the five first Querys, of the Eleven, which I mention’d to you

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in my first Discours, sometime ago; to day, I shall endeavour to answer the Six other Querys yet Remaining, by giving you some Annotations on Each one of ’em, in as short, & easy, & plain, & clear a Manner as I am capable. The First of ’em is this: Whether Magicians make a Circle or No? The Words in the Sentence are these: – [Latin quotation], In English thus: – And by his Orders, & Commands, you have bound yourselves by Oath, taken by you all, & by Every one of you, upon a Circle (which is an Emblem of the Divinity) Drawn upon the Earth (w[hi]ch is the Foot-stool of God’s feet.) [Latin quotation]. Trampling in Contempt under your feet, the Cross, the sacred Sign of your Redemption. The Figure of a round Circle, C[hristian] A[uditor] differs most from the Figure of a Cross, & is the most unlike it. The Figure of a Cross, must of necessity have four corners in it, whereas that of a round circle, has none at all. Now, tis the usual custom of the Devil, to use such kind of Figures, as are most different, from the sacred Sign of our Redemption, and of his own eternal Ruine. \so that/ if any Witch, or any other Person, who has any dealings with him, happen in his presence thrô surprise, to Bless himself with it, He immediately leaves him, & instantly disappears. Tis Reported of the Emperour Julian, at first a Christian, but afterwards an Apostat, that being very much addicted to the Art Magick, & dealing with the Devil; & happening one day, by some means or other, to raise the Devil, & being terribly surpris’d, & frighted at the sight of him; In the dismal terrour & Horrour he was in, He bless’d himself immediately with the Sign of the Cross, (as he has been taught to do, in all frights, & Dangers, when he was a Christian.) upon which, the Devil instantly disappear’d, & left him. In this same matter, many latter Histories also do agree, w[hi]ch credibly report, that several who frequented the Assemblies of Witches, upon the sudden surprise, at the sight of the Devil there, blessing themselves with the sign of the Cross, have been left immediatly all alone in the open fields. This very thing happened, (as it is more at large express’d in the Inditement charg’d against the 18 Witches condemn’d at Avignon) to a young Boy, who was carryed by his father one \night/ to the rendevous, where those Witches were to meet: who when he saw what abominable vilanies were acted in it, He was terrified so exceedingly, that making the sign of the Cross, w[hi]ch is as great a terrour to the Devils, as the Devils were to him, He spoke these words, in the Language of that Country, Jesu! Que veut dire cela? O Jesus! What is the meaning of all this? Upon which, the Devils, & all the Company vanish’d, & disappear’d immediatly; and left the poor young boy, horribly frightened as he was, all alone in the dark, at midnight, to shift for himself. Who coming home the next day to the Village where he lived, (which was about 9 Miles distant from the Place where he

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was left,) He accused his Father for carrying him thither; and from that time, the People of that Village call’d him in their Language, Masquillon; that is to say in English, The little Witch. And this Boy remain’d in the Prison belonging to the Palace of Avignon, at the time, when his Father, & the rest of the 18 Malefactors abovemention’d, were executed there; being there detain’d for the Discovery of what he had seen or heard, concerning the like Evill Practises, as far as he knew, & could give an account of ’em. Tis said of the Lion, The Chiefest, & greatest devourer of all the Beasts of Prey (& therefore, by St Peter, the Devil himself not unaptly compar’d to him;) that when he is going about to devour his Prey, He makes a circle with his tail all round about it, out of which the Poor trembling beast dares not stir the least, such is the Fear & terrour that he is in, of his stern & roaring Adversary there by him, just going to tear him limb from limb, & instantly devour him. So that we may not improperly apply this short sentence of St Peter, to the Devil, our Infernal Enimy; [Latin quotation]. Brethren, be sober, & upon your guard, because your adversary the Devil, like a roaring \Lion/ runs round about, seeking whom he may devour. Thus these poor ignorant deluded wretches stand in dread & awe of the Devil, their Lord, & Master, & are in continual frights & apprehensions, day & night, For fear, that since they have deliver’d themselves up entirely, & have sworn fealty, subjection, & obedience to him forevermore, He would break their necks, or do some other desperate mischief to ’em, should they offer to abandon him, or disoblige him the lest soever; as it evidently appears, by their own Confessions, & acknowledgements, at their trial, in the court of justice. Let us now proceed on to the Seventh Query which is this; Whether Witches use a Staff, & Ointment, thereby to be transported & carried thrô the Air from one place to another? The Seventh Annotation. The Words in the Sentence are these: [Latin quotation]. In English thus – By the help of a staff, dawb’d all over w[i]th a most execrable Ointment, prescrib’d you by the Devil Himself, getting astride upon it, you have been transported, & carried thrô the air, to a place appointed, at Midnight, a fit & convenient hour for such villanies, & upon Days assigned by the Tempter himself. Tis Certain, Ch[ristian] Aud[itor], that Witches, & Magicians have for a long time made use of staves for the purpose abovemention’d. Aben Ezra a learned & celebrated Doctor of the Jewish Law, in his exposition on that Passage, of the 19th Chapter of Leviticus, where it is prohibited to do any Act appartaining to this diabolical kind of art; expressed by what means this was usually practis’d; [Latin quotation]. You shall make, says he, no experiments, neither by Figures, nor by Staves, not by works, nor by Motion, not by Days, nor Hours. In which particulars, he seems to hint at the Principal points Contain’d in the Articles of Inditement, charged

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against the Witches condemn’d at Avignon. For as to Figures; Mention is there made of the use of the Circle: As to Staves; tis there declared, that they made use of ’em, to ride on ’em to their \nightly/ Meetings. As to works, tis plain, what wicked pranks they play’d upon dead bodies, & upon young Infants, whom they inhumanly murder’d, & devour’d at the places of their Rendevous. As to Motion. Tis there affirm’d, that their Bodies were transported & hurried thrô the Air, from one place to another. As to Days, & Hours: Thursday was the Day, which they were order’d to observe \For their meetings at the place Appointed: & the Hour; soon/ after Midnight; at which time only they were thus transported, as they all agreed, to their Rendevous. The Turks keep their Sabbath Day, on Frydays; The Jews keep theirs, on Saturdays; & the Christians theirs, on Sundays. The Devil has Instituted his Sabbath, on Thursday, before ’em all, being ambitious, as tis suppos’d, to have the first fruits offer’d him, & the first adoration pay’d him preferably to the God that made him. Such is his hellish Pride! such his audacious Arrogance! such his intolerable presumption! As for the Ointment, with which Witches & Magicians anoint their Staves, & Bodies, at such times as they are to go to their places of Rendevous, tis certain that the Devil, the better to delude \those/ poor miserable wretches, who have devoted themselves to him, & more craftily conceal his own mischievous designs from ’em, orders ’em to make a compound of several ingredients, of some certain Hearbs, & Roots, & flowers, & the like, frivolous, insignificant & ineffectual in it self; for the devil knows well enough, that such a sort of ointment, has nothing of any power, or effect in it, to transport any humane Bodies thrô the Air, from one Place to another: & indeed common experience evidently may evince it; No, Christians, This he dos, only for a disguise to his malicious designs; his main aim is levell’d at no other mark, than Murder, & to make then Imbue their hands in the Innocent Blood of Infants, as it plainly & clearly appears by the Depositions of all Sorcerers, who all concur, & agree unanimously in this point, that it suffices at First for ’em, if they borrow a little of this ointment of such who keep it by ’em; but when they are at the assembly, where the Witches meet, The Devil declares to ’em, that they are to have some ointment of their own, & that it cannot be effectual, or of any use to ’em, for the purpose it is design’d, unless they get the grease of some young child or other, that has been strangled by ’em. Apuleius, One who was much suspected in his days, of dealing in the black Art, Reports of himself; that on a certain evening, he was conducted by a servant maid, about midnight, to behold the Mistress of the house, whereunto he was guided, anointing herself all over with a certain ointment, which she had in a pot by her; & that when she had made an end of besmearing herself with it, she was changed into an owl, & flew out of the house immediately, as he observ’d. He also relates to us, what the Ingredients of this ointment

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were; viz: certain spicy, fragrant, or sweet-smelling hearbs, & some parts of dead Corps’s, which had been buried, & dug up again for that intent: that all was boil’d together, in a great brass Kettle, with milk & Honey, & some other stuff of the like nature; & certain magical words of conjuration pronounc’d over the whole Compound. And indeed, we find this truly verifyed, by the acknowledgment of the 18 Witches abovemention’d, condemn’d at Avignon; who all confess’d at their Tryal, that they were used to boil dead Bodies, which they dug up by night, & with the fat of their Kidneys, & several sorts of Hearbs, they made up a certain Ointment, which they used, as they were order’d by the Devil. From this inhumane, & unnatural practice of Grave-Robbers, & Grave-Riflers, in the time of Apuleius, there was a law enacted by the Romans, to punish such with death, who should offer to violate the Graves, or Sepulchres of the Dead, who lay there interr’d; It being a criminal injustice; not only contrary to the Law of Nations, commonly call’d, jus Gentium. I said Above, if you observe, Grave-Robbers, & Grave-Riflers. By Grave-Robbers, I meant, such, who dug Graves open \secretly by night/, with intent, to steal the Bodies away, which were buried in ’em. By the Grave-Riflers, I meant such, who by committing that notorious Crime, intended nothing else, but to pilfer, & Carry off the costly Furniture, the Dead Corps’s were wrapt in, & strip ’em of all the ornaments that were Rich, or of any value about ’em. By the First, are intimated, Witches & Magicians; By the Latter, are signified, Pilfering night Rogues & Thieves; Call’d in the Greek Language tumbōruchoi. Which signifies in English, Grave-Diggers. That which tempted those night-Rogues to commit this notorious villany, was this. It was a custom in those days, both among the Grecians, & also among the Romans, to bury the Corps’s of all Persons of great Quality & Dignity amongst ’em, not only in the most Pompous, & Magnificent manner possible, but also to set ’em forth with the Most costly furniture, & richest ornaments of Jewels & gold Rings; & Gold & silver Coin, & Medals, inclosed in urns, which they buried with ’em. This tempted such, I say, Who were wickedly inclined, to Rifle, & Strip the Dead, at the hazard of their own lives, if detected, & convicted of it. To prevent such villainous, & sacrilegious doings, severe laws were made, & most grievous punishments were threaten’d: And not only that; but as Apuleius testifyes, it was then the custom, to hire certain Persons, to stand & watch a-nights at the Sepulchres of the Dead, to secure \em/ from being rifled, or stolen away, either by thieves, or Witches. To this he adds, That He himself one night being set to watch a Corps which lay unburied; towards the dead of night, somewhat like a Weasel came secretly into the Room, but upon sight of him, it immediately made off again, & appear’d no more. Such is the inveterate hatred, such the Mortal Envy of the Infernal Enimy, Against Mankind, seeking all the ways

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he can, to ruin ’em while living; & not sparing any mischief, that tis in his Power to do ’em, even after they are dead & Buried, in their Graves. But of this enough: I shall therefore proceed on to the Eighth Query, Which is this, Whether Witches are transported, & move, & pass to & fro in the Air, from one place to Another? The Eighth Annotation. The Words in the Sentence are These: – [Latin quotation]. In English thus: – You have been convey’d, & Carried thrô the Air, to a place appointed, at Midnight, a fit & convenient hour for such vilanies, & upon days assign’d you by the tempter himself: &c: There are some that Question, Whether the Devil has so much Power, as to make a Human Body move in the Air, or to transport it to & fro, from one Place to Another. But this doubt of theirs, C[hristian] A[uditor] is certainly very groundless; & shows that they \are/ very ignorant, & dont well understand what the nature, & the Property of a Spirit is: For a Spirit is of a more excellent, & more noble Composition, than any human Body whatsoever; & therefore has a power of his own nature, to move at pleasure whithersoever he has a mind. True indeed it is, that Man is particularly shelter’d & defended under God’s almighty Providence; yet this does not hinder, but that God for some reasons, may, & has suffer’d & permitted this sometimes to be done. This is plainly evident, by what the Scripture Mentions of Jesus Christ Himself. The Words of the Gospel are these; Jesus was led by the Spirit into the Desert, to be tempted by the Devil; & when He had \fasted/ Forty days, & 40 nights, Afterwards he was Hungry. And the Tempter approaching him, said thus to Him: If Thou art the Son of God, bid these Stones to be bread. But Jesus reply’d to Him; it is written, Man dos not subsist on Bread alone, but on every word that proceeds from the Mouth of God. Then the Devil took Him into the Holy City, & setting him on a Pinacle of the Temple, He said to him, If Thou art the Son of God, cast thy self down from hence: For it is written, That He has given his Angels in charge, to take care of Thee; & to Support Thee with their Hands; Least perhaps Thou shoudst Hit thy Foot against a Stone. Jesus Made answer to him; it is also written, Thou shalt not Tempt the Lord thy God: Again, the Devil took Him, to the Top of a very high Mountain, & showing Him all the Kingdoms of the World, & all the Glory of ’em, he said to Him, all these things I will give Thee, if Thou’lt fall down & worship Me: Then Jesus reply’d to him, Go Satan, get thee gone, For it is written, Thou shalt adore the Lord thy God, And Him only shalt Thou serve. At w[hi]ch, The Devil Left Him; & Angels came immediatly & waited on Him. We see by this Account, which the Scripture has here given us, that our Blessed Redeemer Jesus Christ, was led by the Spirit into the Desert

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to be tempted by the Devil: And that the Devil took him from thence, up into the Holy City of Jerusalem, & set Him on a Pinacle of the Temple: & from thence again \took/ him unto a very high Mountain. Now if the Devil could do this, by the Divine permission, even to the Sacred Person of Jesus Christ Himself; we have much more reason to believe, that he has power to do the like, by the same Divine permission, to other Men; & espicially to such profligate, miserable, & forlorn wretches, who have renounc’d & abandon’d God, to go worship & Adore the Devill. Another Instance we have, relating to our Present Purpose, in the Account we have, from Hegissipus, a very creditable Historian, of Simon Magus, (that is to say in English, Simon the Magician) who was carried in the Air by Devils for a little while, but at the Prayers of St Peter, & by the just judgment of God, He suddenly fell down upon the ground, & Broke his Legs, being forsaken by the Devils who were about him, for his support. The Account which is given of it by the Historian, is as Follows: Towards the latter end of the Emperor Nero’s Reign, St Peter being at Rome, & finding the People there extremely exasperated and incens’d against Christians, & Christianity, by the Magical Arts, & insinuations of Simon above-mention’d, Who was got into so great favour & veneration among the Common People, & in so high esteem of the Emperor himself, that St Justin Martyr assures us, he was worshipp’d as a God, & had a Statue erected to him, in Insula Tiberina, with this Inscription, Simoni Deo Sancto. To Simon the Holy God. St Peter, I say, being then at Rome, & acquainted with these Proceedings of that notorious Impostor; And being himself famed for raising the Dead to Life: It happen’d, that a Kinsman of the Emperor, being lately deceas’d, His friends sent for St Peter to restore him again to life. Simon, & his Friends being appris’d hereof, in like manner prevail’d, that He should be sent for too, on the same Account. St Peter, & Simon Magus, meeting both together at the place, & Day appointed; Simon, with great presumption, made this proposal to St Peter; That if He, (that is Simon) rais’d the Gentleman deceas’d to life; He, (that is St Peter) who had injuriously provoked the great Power of God, as arrogantly he call’d himself, should lose his life: & that if St Peter prevail’d, He was willing to submit to the same fate: Which terms were readily accepted by St Peter. Accordingly Simon, beginning his usuall Charms, the Party dead seemed to move his hand; At which, the People, who were there Present, began to fall upon St Peter: Who begging their Patience, & forbearance for a little while; He told ’em, it was nothing but a meer Cheat: And if Simon was but removed from the bedside they should quickly see, that it would evidently appear so. Whereupon, by a short & humble prayer calling upon God, He commanded the Dead Party, in the Name of Jesus Christ, instantly to rise; which accordingly he did. Hereupon, The People fell furiously upon Simon, with intention, to have

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ston’d him to death; which St Peter seeing, begg’d of ’em to spare his life. Simon the Magician, vex’d at wt had happen’d, & seeing all the Company inrag’d, & incens’d against him, put on as bold a face as he could upon the Matter; & told ’em, He was offended at the Christians, whose Protector he had been: And to let ’em see what power he had, He set a certain day, upon which he promis’d, they should see him, in their sight, fly up to Heaven. Accordingly, at the Time appointed, he went up to the very \top/ of the Mountain, on which the Capitol stood, & darting himself from thence, He began his flight; which the People seeing, were struck with great surprise & admiration, affirming that this could not be done by the power of any Man, but must certainly be perform’d by somewhat more than human. St Peter in the Mean time, offering up humble prayers to God to confound the Presumptuous Sorcerer, & undeceive the deluded People, Simon Magus’s wings, which he had contrived himself, immediatly began to flag, & the Devils supporting him no longer, He fell with that violence to ground poor wretch, That He broke both his legs, & was bruis’d so miserably by the Fall, that being convey’d from thence to a neighbouring Village, he dyed soon after. I could here alledg to you, C[hristian] A[uditor] Many other Instances of the like nature evidently to prove to you, that the Devil certain\ly/ has a power, to support, & to transport, not only human Bodies, but any other Creatures animate, or inanimate, thrô the air, & carry ’em from one place to another, when God is so pleas’d to suffer it, & permit it. But what I have affirmd of it, I hope will suffice; my time not allowing me to insist any longer on it, but obliging to hasten on to the next Query, Which is this: Whether Witches Eat, & Drink & Dance &c: at their night-Meetings, & the places of their Rendevous? The Ninth Annotation The Words in the Sentence are These: – [Latin quotation]: In English thus: – And there, at the Common Rendevous of many other Magicians, Sorcerers, Witches, Hereticks, Enchanters, & Worshipers of Devils, before a horrid & dismal fire, after great rejoicings, Dancing, junketing, revelling, Sporting, & all manner of disorderly merriments, & Diversions, in honour of Beelzebub, the Prince of Devils, there presiding: &c. The works of the Devil, C[hristian] A[uditor] or as St Paul calls ’em, in his Epistle to the Galatians, The Works of the Flesh, are these here Following; besides several others, which He there reckons up, that relate not to the present Purpose: Commessationes, Revellings; that is to say in plainer English, an unseasonable, or unreasonable Eating; or a junketing, Drinking, Dancing, Merry making the whole night long. Ebrietates, Drunkennesses. That is intemperate, & Immoderate Excesses in Drinking, beyond all sense & Reason: Fornicatio, whoredom; Immunditia: The Sin of uncleaness, Otherwise Call’d Pollution, or Self-Abuse. Impudicitia.

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Lewdness, wantoness, Debauchery, Lasciviousness. Luxuria. Luxury. A General Word expressing all manner of Sins soever, against Purity & Chastity. Idolorum Servitus; Idolatry. Veneficia: Witchcrafts; Homicidia: Murders. These were the Sins, & some worse sins than these, much more enormous, far more detestable, infinitely more unpardonable, that the 18 Witches at Avignon abovemention’d, were accus’d & Convicted of; & for which they were there Condemn’d, & punish’d as they deserv’d. And this is the very Case, & these are the wicked Practices, (as we are Credibly inform’d by the Authours who have written of these Matters;) of all Witches, & Sorserers in general in their nightly Meetings, & at the Appointed places, of their common Rendevous. Places, which, St Jerom tells us, the Devils agree upon, to have certain Victuals Brought ’em, that are promis’d ’em, by Witches; That is, as tis commonly suppos’d, Murder’d Infants, or other dead Corps’s new\ly/ buried, & dug up; Which Witches convey thither, & set before ’em for the Abominable use & purpose that they are design’d. & where afterwards they are order’d to be cook’d & Dress’d, for the Entertainment of the Devils Guests there assembled; to be eaten, & devour’d by ’em, after an unnatural kind of Manner. Not that the Devils themselves so, or can, eat any earthly kind of Food; being Spirits as they are, & incapable of so doing; But in appearance seem, to do it, that they may induce, & persuade others to eat freely of it; knowing the notorious wickedness, of such an Abominable piece of Vilany: Anthropophagy, that is, Eating of Man’s-Flesh, being as detestable a Crime, as it is unnatural, & utterly forbidden by the Laws both of God, & Man: A crime as shocking to Humanity, & common reason, as it is to the established maxims, & Principles of Christianity. As to other sorts of Meat, Or victuals, which He causes to be set before ’em, they seem to please the Palate, & give somewhat of a Gusto, or Relish to the tast, Yet when these deluded Witches, return to their own homes, they find themselves as hungry, if not more hungry, than they were before. Which shews it to be nothing else but a meer delusion, Conformable hereunto, is the observation of St Thomas of Aquin, Assuring us, that thô all natural Bodies, or created things, in respect of Motion & Quality are under the Power of Spirits; Yet Spirits cannot change or alter the Substances of ’em: that’s only in the Power of God to do, as being the Supreme Creator of all things in Being. All the Power that Spirits Have, is, to make a Change or Alteration in the Accidents, or outward appearances: Or to express in other words; Spirits have not power, to Change one thing into another; But they have power to make one appear very like another, to all outward Appearance. For example, The Devil cannot turn a stone into Bread, nor turn a piece of Bread, into a Stone; But He can make a Stone to be very like Bread, & Bread very like a stone, to all outward Appearance. He cannot change a Man into a Dog, nor a Woman into a Cat; But by his crafty, &

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Diabolical delusions, He can make both one & tother appear to very like those Creatures, that to the eyes of any one that dos behold ’em, they shall really seem to be so. From hence we may make this Inference, & draw this Conclusion; That when Sorserers or Witches are Changed into Cats, or Owls, or Wolves, or any such like resemblances, (as both they themselves, & many others have acknowledg’d & confess’d, they have often been, & have deposed it upon oath) We are not to imagine, that the true substance of those Men, or the true Substance of those Women is really chang’d into the true Substance, & nature of those very Beasts: No Christians, That’s what is beyond the extent of the Devil’s power: But that the Devil covers, & encompasses their Bodies round about with a certain cloud of Air, shap’d to the Form, or Likeness of such or such a Beast. For as He himself sometimes, takes a human shape, & seems to appear in it like a perfect Man; having taken such an airy form upon him, & cloth’d & cover’d & Conceal’d himself, under that disguise. In like manner it appears also to those that behold those Witches, being thus disguis’d, in the shape of Beasts; & even to themselves too, that they are truly such, thô in effect, & in reality they are not so. Hence I shall make this other inference, & therewith put a close to this Ninth Query. That the Victuals, & Drink, which the Devils provide for the Entertainment of the Witches in their nightly Meetings, at their places of Rendevous, are not in reality either Meat or Drink, as they seem to them to be; nor have any thing of any nourishment in ’em, as all other food has: All’s nothing in Reality, but a false delusion to their Eyes, & a deceitful imposition, on their tast & Appetit. My time being pretty far spent, here calls upon me, to hasten to the Tenth Query.which is this. Whether Witches Worship the Devil in their nightly Meetings, in the Shape of a Goat? The Tenth Annotation The Words in the Sentence are These: – [Latin quotation]: – In English Thus: – Belzebub, the Prince of Devils, un\der/ the Form & Shape of a most illfavour’d, & stinking Black Goat, you have worship’d, & Adored as God, both in Words & Deeds. &c: That the Devil is ambitious of nothing more, than to be worship’d & Ador’d by Men as their Sovereign Lord & God, I have sufficiently declar’d to you already, C[hristian] A[uditor] & also concerning the visible Shape, in w[hi]ch he is accustom’d to Appear to Men. But St Austin tells us, he is not permitted at all times, to invest himself with what form or shape he pleases, or naturally has a power to take upon himself; but is limited to such forms, & such semblances, as God is pleased to allow him, by his Divine permission. So that, When he comes to be Ador’d & worshipp’d by Witches, at their Meetings, & rendezvous, He dos not then appear in a

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Human Shape; but, as the Witches themselves have testified, & depos’d, as soon as they are agreed of the Time that he is to Mount upon his Throne, an altar for that intent, (Which is commonly some Rock, or some great Stone, or Hill, standing in the Fields) He instantly turns himself, into the form of a Great Black Goat; thô on all other occasions, he usually appears in human shape like Men. For God will not permit him thus impiously to abuse the Nature of Man By reason that Jesus Christ, his Divine & Eternal Son, is a True Man, And worshipp’d & Adored by Men, both as God, & Man: For \By/ the Hypostatical Union of both Natures in Jesus Christ, the Divine, & Human; both of ’em, are so indissolubly, & inseparably united each to other, that there is but one Essence, one only Person that arises from both Natures. Hence probably it is, that God will not permit him, to assume the Form of the Son of God, or as He is often call’d in Scripture, the Son of Man, when he is about to be worshipp’d, & Ador’d by Men; but only that of a Brute Beast, or of some other illfavour’d, & Monstrous shape, as that of Satyrs, Centaurs, or the like; represented to us like Monsters, Half beast, half Man, which in effect, & in reality, were nothing else but Divels. I could tell you a great Deal more relating to this subject, but for fear of appearing tedious, & quite trying out your Patience, Let this suffice. The Eleventh & Last Query Which I engaged to discours upon, was this. Whether Devils may have, or have ever had carnal communication with Men & Women respectively in Human Shape? The Eleventh Annotation. The Words in the Sentence are These: [Latin quotation]: – In English thus: – Infine, adding Sin to Sin, & heaping Crimes upon Crimes, You Men with Devils in Female Shape; You Women with Devils in shape of Men; O Detestable Abomination! have had Carnal Copulation; & have shamefully committed with ’em, by the\ir/ cold embraces, downright Sodomy, & a most Abominable Crime. Here’s a Sin, C[hristian] Auditors, of so very Black a Dye, An Act of Hellish Vilany so very foul, so extreamly Abominable, so exceedingly detestable, so very shocking to Human Nature, & contrary to all sense & reason, That I am utterly at a loss, what to say about it. Should I discours of it, & make my remarks upon it, as hitherto I have done in answering to the Other Querys; I should break thrô all the Rules, & transgress the usual Bounds of Modesty, & common Decency; Should I say nothing of it, but wrap it up in silence, I might seem to you, by so doing, to look upon it, as a meer flam, an Idle story, a groundless report, or a Silly Whim, & nothing real in it. What must I do in so perplext a case? Christians, In this so nice a Point, Tis enough for you to know; & for me to tell you, That tis certain, & undeniable, that such a Horrid, Brutish, Hellish Sin there is; & that Devils & Witches of both Sexes, are abominably guilty of it, in their nightly Meetings, at their Common

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Rendevous. The Words in the Sentence above rehearsd, prove it, in express terms, to be Clearly & Evidently, plain, downright Matter of Fact. And innumerable Instances, & testimonies might be here produced, if I thought it proper, Out of the Writings of the Holy Fathers, & Divines, & Doctors, of the Church, & many other Learned Authours of unblemish’d Credit, fully to convince you of it. But this, I hope, is sufficient, & abundantly enough, to make you sensible, that such a horrid & Hellish Crime there is; And, at the same time, sensibly to instill into you, an utter Abhorrence, & Abomination, for such a Wicked, & unnatural, & unaccountable an Act of Vilany. As to any thing else, relating to this foul, shameful Sin, \I shall draw the Curtain over it/ & shall pass it by in silence, & say no more. I have done, C[hristian] A[uditor] But before I leave the Chair, it may not be amiss to revive your memories a little, for a minute or two, by reminding you of the Chief Matters I have particularly insisted on, in all the three discourses which I have lately entertain’d you with, on the important subject of Witches & Witchcraft; & the Fatal Mischiefs which are Acted in the world by the delusions of the Devil, a Sworn & Common Enimy to all Mankind. Now the Best & properest method I Can propose to succeed herein, is by repeating to you in short, the chief heads, or points contain’d in the sentence of Condemnation frequently abovemention’d, past upon the 18 Criminals at Avignon for Witchcraft, & dealing with the Devil; Upon which I have given \you/ some few remarks, to make ’em the more intelligible. And they are as follows. The Person, Who sate as Judg, in the Cause of the Aforesaid Criminals, in the Sentence he pronounc’d against ’em, at their Condemnation, publickly declared thus to ’em in the open Court: That by the Acknowledgment, & Confession of every one of ’em in particular, even with a Solemn Oath, as also by the Depositions, accusations, & testimonies of Witnesses, & other lawfull evidences, & Proofs, It appear’d plain & Evident to all, tht they all, & every one of ’em Had Renounc’d God; & had Worshipp’d the Accursed Devil, & had given themselves up to him forevermore. That they had all Renounced their Baptism; & those who were Goships at it. That they \had/ done this in the Presence of the Devil, appearing in a human Shape to ’em. That the Devil pouring other water on ’em, they receiv’d it; changing their true Christian Name, into another Name, which he Impos’d upon ’em. That for a Pledg of their Fidelity to him, they had deliver’d to him a little scantling of their Cloths: & that He might strike ’em Effectually out of the Book of life, they had writ their Names down, with their own hand, in a Dismal Black Book. And that the Devil might have ’em faster, & more closely bound, he had set his Mark, or Brand on Every One of ’em. That they had bound selves by oath, to him, taken upon a Circle, drawn upon the Ground, trampling in contempt the Cross

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under their Feet; by his Order, & Command. That by the Help of a Staff, dawb’d over with a kind of ointment, prescrib’d ’em by the Devil, getting astride upon it, they had been carried thrô the Air, at Midnight, to the place of their Rendevous: Where with many other Worshipers of the Devil, before a dismal fire, after Great rejoicings, in honour of Belzebub, Prince of Devils, there Presiding, in the Shape of a Black Goat, They had ador’d \him/ as God, both in Words, & Deeds: & Had made offerings to him of Lighted Candles made of Pitch, & had payed, with the greatest reverence, upon their knees, a most infamous homage to him. That following the Devil’s advice, & by his Assistance, they had often practis’d Witchcrafts, Enchantments, & other revengeful doings, on human Creatures, & also on other animals. That it Evidently had been proved against ’em, That they had Smother’d, stabb’d & Murther’d many poor little Infants, & had done to Others many most grievous mischiefs; & that after they had been buried in the Church-Yard, they had dug ’em out of their graves secretly by night; & had carried \’em/ to their Meetings, appointed for their Rendevous; & had made an offering of ’em to the Prince of Devils, seated on his Throne, Having taken out, & reserv’d for their own use, The Fat, & Head, & Hands, & Feet cut off, & the remainder of the mangled Bodys, they had taken care, to have stew’d, or Boil’d, or rosted, for the Devil & his Crew, & had afterwards fed on ’em, & most damnably had devour’d ’em. Infine, that adding Sin to Sin, The Men, with Devils in Female Shape, The Women, with Devils in Shape of Men, had had carnal copulation; & committed downright Sodomy, & a most abominable Crime. And what was yet worse, & the most detestable of all; by the instigation of the said Devil; That, having sometimes receiv’d the most adorable Sacrament of the Blessed Eucharist, in the holy Church of God, They had held in their Mouths, till they departed from the Altar, & had afterwards sacrilegiously & impiously spit it out again upon the Ground, that they might dishonour the True, & most holy God, with the greater ignominy, Affront, Impiety, & contempt; & by that means promote The Devil, & his Honour, & Glory, & Triumph, & Kingdom; & thereby might glorify, & magnify, & set him forth with all the Pomp, & Honour, & Praise, & dignity, & Authority, & Adoration, that they were capable. All which most Horrible, most abominable, & most detestable Practises of theirs, tended directly to the Dishonour, & affront of God, the supreme, & Divine Creator both of Heaven & Earth, & the Sovereign Lord, & Master of all things in Being. I shall here close up, & put a final end to my Discourses, upon this uncommon Subject, in the same words of the Apostle, to the People of Ephesus, by w[hi]ch I at first began: – Brethren be Strengthen’d in the Lord, & in the might of his Power: Put on you the Armour of God, that you may stand against the Snares of the Infernal Enimy. For our wrestling

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is not against Flesh, & Blood, but against Principalities & Powers, against the Rulers of the world of this Darkness; Against the Evil Spirits of Wickedness in the Air. By which Words of the Apostle, to the People of Ephesus; & by what you have heard spoken to you, on that Important subject, in all the Three Discourses, which I have deliver’d to you; You cannot but be sensible, C[hristian] A[uditor] That it was not w[i]th out good reason, it was not in vain, that St Paul so earnestly then exhorted those Ephesians, & in them, all Christians nowadays, to be constantly upon their guard, ever Vigilant, ever Careful, ever cautiously to beware, for fear of Being surpris’d at unawares, by the Crafty Stratagems, & dangerous delusions, of the Devil, The Invidious, & Sworn Enimy, both to God, & Man: Ever seeking & contriving utterly to undo us, & eternally involve us in his own Damnation, by all the Subtle, & Mischievous ways, that tis possible for him to do it. Let us utterly then abhor, utterly detest, utterly Renounce, Both Him, & all his Works, & Pomps; as by our Promises, & Vows in Baptism, we have solemnly engaged to do; And give all Glory & Honour, to our Sovereign, & Divine Creator, as the only True, & Everlasting God. And End with those most admirable & Pathetick words, of St Paul, in his First to Timothy: [Latin quotation]. To the King of Ages, Immortal, & Invisible, The Only True, & Ever-living God, Let all Praise, & Glory, & Honour be duely Given, by all Created Beings, both in Heaven & on Earth, Forevermore. Amen.

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Index Page references in italic refer to Appendix 1. Appendix 2 is not indexed. Abbott, George, archbishop of Canterbury, 90 Act of Union (1801), 71–2 Ady, Thomas, author, 15, 144, 164 Agnus Dei, 62, 155–6, 183 alchemy, 37, 45, 46–7, 158, 161 Alker, William, 145 Allegiance, Oath of, 9, 32, 165 Allen, Thomas, scholar, 49, 161–2 Allen, William, Cardinal, 32, 38, 83–4 Almond, Oliver, author, 42–3, 207 Ampleforth, 109–10 amulets, 47–8 Anabaptists, 204, 208, 233 angels, 1, 5, 19, 26, 39–40, 48, 51, 65, 68, 88, 94, 102, 157, 159–60, 161, 172 Archangel Gabriel, 160 Archangel Michael, 193 guardian, 94, 149, 211–12 Anglicanism, see Church of England Anglo-Gallicanism, see Gallicanism Anne, Queen of Great Britain, 58, 188 anthropophagy, see cannibalism anti-Catholicism, 13–15, 17, 18, 23, 25, 35, 57, 83, 96, 110, 118, 121, 147, 148, 160, 166 and accusations of fake exorcisms, 192, 200, 202 and accusations of magic, 137–40, 193 and accusations of witchcraft, 136–7, 142–3, 146, 149 ghost narratives as, 80, 89, 97 antichrist, the, 135, 184 anti-Sadducism, 56–7, 133 Antwerp, 215

bishop of, 210, 214 Carmelite convent at, 123, 124, 168, 212 apocalypticism, 184–5, 186 apparitions, see ghosts Appellant Controversy, 9, 10–11, 32, 73 Aquinas, Thomas, see Aristotelianism Arabic, 37, 221 Archpriest Controversy, 9, 21, 32 Aristotelianism radical, 45, 48–9; see also Blackloism Scholastic, 9, 26, 44–5, 48–9, 50, 51, 68, 73, 85, 88, 127, 166, 178, 215 of Thomas Aquinas, 46, 48–9, 51, 88, 127n., 184 of Francisco Suárez, 48–9 Aristotle, 45, 46–7, 48, 51, De Anima, 48 On Dreams, 127 Physics, 46, 53 Armstrong, Robert, Dominican, 207, 220, 231n. Arrowsmith, Edmund, Jesuit martyr, 62 Arundel, 99 Ashton, Jane, demoniac, 201, 232 Ashton, Thomas, demoniac, 156, 202–3, 233 astrology, 37, 39, 45, 47, 49, 57, 135–7, 139, 157–62 Atkins, William, Jesuit, 93, 217, 218, 232 Atkinson, John, 220 Augustinian Canonesses, 19

296

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at Bruges, 107, 175–6, 223 at Louvain, 41, 94 of the Holy Sepulchre, 112–13 Aveling, Hugh, historian, 2, 14, 33, 141 Babington, Anthony, conspirator, 198 Baddely, Richard, author, 17, 18, 143, 153, 191–2, 201–2 Baius, Michael, theologian, 7 Baker, Thomas, Non-Juror, 53 Bale, John, reformer, 89, 157, 202 Bancroft, Richard, archbishop of Canterbury, 17, 149, 193, 197, 198 baptism, see exorcism, at baptism Barlow, Edward Ambrose, Benedictine martyr, 207, 231n. Barlow, Rudesind, Benedictine, 207 Barlow, William, author, 86 Barnes, Robert, recusant, 197, 198 Basin, Bernard, demonologist, 129–30 Bede, 28, 56 Bedingfield, Edmund, exorcist, 22, 124, 153, 173, 209–15, 216 Bedingfield family, 103–4, 111–14 Bellarmine, Robert, theologian, 41, 129, 194, 196 Belson, John, 61 Benedict XIV, pope, 69 Benedictines, 19 monks, 60, 70–71, 176, 177, 178, 207, 216–17 nuns, 113, 122–3, 127 Bennet, John, Jesuit, 218, 232 Bennett, Edward, secular priest, 102 Benson, Robert Hugh, novelist, 98 Berington, Joseph, priest and author, 20, 74–6, 115 Berington, Simon, 66 Bernard, Richard, jurist, 157 Betham, John, theologian, 59–60, 61 bewitchment, see witchcraft Bible and key, see divination Bierley, Ellen, reputed witch, 144–5 Bierley, Jennet, reputed witch, 144–6 Bilson, Leonard, magician, 134

Binsfeld, Peter, demonologist, 129 Blackloism, 9, 32, 49, 54, 74; see also Digby, Kenelm; Sergeant, John; White, Thomas as anti-sceptical philosophy, 50, 134 as a form of Aristotelianism, 51, 53 relationship to Jansenism, 60–61 views on psychology, 222 Blackwell, George, see Archpriest Controversy Blake, Mr, secular priest, 154–5, 232 Blount, Anne, demoniac, 175–6 Blount, Edward, 68 Blount, Walter, 112 Blundell family, 98 Blundell, Nicholas, diarist, 63 Bodenham, Anne, cunning-woman, 139–40 Bodin, Jean, demonologist, 129, 130, 131, 140–41 Booker, John, astrologer, 162 books, English Catholic, 9n., 17–18, 20, 60, 71, 82, 84, 195, 197–8, 205 Boonen, Jacob, archbishop of Mechelen, 123 Bonner, Edmund, bishop of London, 7, 125–6 Bossy, John, historian, 3, 4, 6, 7, 33, 176, 189–90, 192 Bostridge, Ian, historian, 4, 25, 163–4 Boucher, Mary, 90–91 Boulton, Richard, author, 179 Bourne, Henry, 220 Boy of Bilson, see Perry, William Boyle, Robert, scientist, 66 Bromhall, John, author, 82 Bromley, Edward, judge, 145–6 Brooke, Robert, Jesuit, 202–3 Brown, Levinius, secular priest, 169 Browne family, 99, 112–3 Browne, Thomas, author, 133 Bruce, Robert, theologian, 31 Bruges, English Convent at, 19, 107, 175–6, 223 Buckinghamshire

INdex

Apsley Guise, 104 Denham, 198 Turville, 158–9 Bulkeley, Anne, Duchess of Berwick, 168 Burgoyne, Humphrey, financier, 103–4, 107 Burrows, Frances, canoness, 94 Burton, Catherine, Carmelite nun, 123, 124, 169, 176 Butler, Alban, secular priest, 95–6, 183, 226 Byron, Lord, 99, 106, 110 cabala, 38 Caius, John, scholar, 161 Calfhill, James, author, 11, 28–9, 127, 129, 182–3; see also Martiall, John Calvin, John, see Calvinism Calvinism, 26, 40, 42, 43, 76, 127, 131–2, 189, 204, 207; see also cessationism; predestination; Protestantism Cambrai, 174 Cambridgeshire Ely, 38 Sawston, 170 Wisbech, 9, 145n. Cambridge University, 45, 53, 161, 165 Cameron, Euan, historian, 11, 27, 30, 119, 164, 173, 182, 194 Camm, Bede, author, 98 Campion, Edmund, Jesuit martyr, 126, 143 Camus, Jean-Pierre, spiritual author, 41 candles, blessed, 217, 219, 220, 221 cannibalism, 119, 149, 150, 184 Canon 72 (Church of England), 196 Carmelite nuns, 16 at Antwerp, 123, 168, 176 at Lierre, 19, 22, 41, 93, 94, 124, 153, 173, 209–16 Cartesianism, 51, 68, 69, 165 Cary, Jane Frances, canoness, 105–7

297

Casaubon, Meric, author, 140 Case, John, philosopher, 46–8 Castaniza, John, spiritual author, 41 Catholic Committee, see Cisalpinism Catholicism, English and popular religion, 1–2, 33–8 definition of, 2–3, 6–7, 25 historiographical debates about, 12–13 Catholic Relief Acts of 1778, 71 of 1791, 71 of 1829, 11, 21, 22, 71, 76, 77, 229 Catlyn, Robert, judge, 135 Cecil, Robert, 1st Earl of Salisbury, 197, 201 Cecil, William, 1st Baron Burghley, 135, 140 celibacy, 36, 221 cessationism, 26, 40, 75, 76; see also miracles Challoner, Richard, Vicar Apostolic, 18, 30, 100, 101 Chambers, Robert, translator, 127 Champney, Anthony, convent chaplain, 123 Chaplin, Maurus, Benedictine monk, 216 Chapter, English, 9, 50, 61 Charles II, King of England, 159 charms, 13, 33, 37, 117, 118, 125, 126, 135, 139, 140, 141, 142, 144, 146, 147–8, 155, 195 Cherington, Anne, servant, 93–4 Church of England, 22, 140, 141, 165, 169, 170, 193, 224; see also high churchmen; Protestantism debates about exorcism in, 16, 196–7 interest in ghosts in, 49 Church Papists, 6, 34, 38, 49 Cisalpinism, 10, 21, 32, 72, 73–4, 76, 115, 172, 227, 229 Civil War, English, 9, 154, 189, 192 Clark, Stuart, historian, 11, 15, 122, 129, 190

298

ENgLisH CatHoLics aNd tHe SuPerNaturaL, 1553–1829

Clarke, Robert, poet, 43–4 Cock Lane ghost, 97 Cocke, Joan, reputed witch, 154 Cogan, Thomas, author, 139 Coleman, Charles, 93–4 Commonwealth of England, 9, 48 communion, 59, 160, 203, 206, 214, 218 Compton Census, 142 confession, sacrament of, 93, 94, 101, 103, 138, 155, 159–60, 196, 205–6, 207, 223 confirmation, sacrament of, 150, 184, 185 conformity occasional, 6, 36, 94, 147, 192 to the Church of England, 18, 22, 41, 100, 155, 156, 203, 209 conjuration, see magic Conjuration Act, see Witchcraft Acts converts to Catholicism, 11, 31, 56, 57, 61, 76, 92, 128 Copsey, Robert, Benedictine monk, 216 Cornelius, John, exorcist, 100–101, 193, 199, 204, 231 Cornwall, 37 Botathen, 221 Launceston, 37, 221 Counter-Reformation, 1–2, 58, 86, 96, 128, 147, 160, 182, 190, 212 in England, 7, 12, 19, 33, 34, 36, 59, 74, 119, 125, 148, 200 in Europe, 11, 26–7, 30–32, 41, 43, 48, 55, 122, 194 radical, 7, 133 Coxe, John, magician, 134–5 Cressy, Hugh Serenus, historian, 56–7, 61, 65 Cromwell family, 121 Cromwell, Oliver, Lord Protector of England, 50 cross, sign of, 29, 151–2, 156, 182–3 crypto-Catholics, 6, 46, 49, 57, 126, 150, 152, 161, 162, 218 Culpepper, Nicholas, herbalist, 162 cunning-folk, 36, 37, 117–18, 140, 147, 154, 158, 218, 221, 226

curses, 98–9, 108, 118, 206 Daillon, Jacques, author, 179 Darrell, John, exorcist, 15, 27, 192, 195, 197, 201, 224, Darrell, William, Jesuit, 169–70 Davies, Owen, historian, 3, 13, 14, 16, 79, 163, 164, 170, 188, 189, 190, 224, 226 Deacon, Thomas, Non-Juror, 165–6, 224, 226 Dee, John, astrologer, 39, 136, 160, 161, 221 deism, 181, 185, 186 Del Rio, Martin, demonologist, 26, 30–31, 119, 120, 127, 131–2, 133, 194 demonology Catholic, 40–44, 69–70, 81, 85–6, 117, 119–34, 149–50, 156, 164, 167, 171–2, 178, 187, 210, 224–5 Protestant, 13, 49, 80, 81, 85–6, 119-34 demons, see demonology Derbyshire, 203 Descartes, René, see Cartesianism Device, Jennet, reputed witch, 148 devil, the, 4, 5, 26, 135, 142, 156, 157, 165–6, 171, 172, 180, 190, 193, 225, 226 in English Catholicism, 16, 29, 30, 40–44, 69–70, 124, 130, 153, 155, 164, 174, 179, 181, 182, 184–5 in English Protestantism, 40, 86, 117, 129, 134–6, 146–7, 148, 151, 158 pact with, 118, 120, 122, 125, 126, 127, 130, 143, 158 possession by, see possession, demonic priest mistaken for, 137–8 worship of, 119–20, 149–50, 152, 180, 186–7 Dibdale, Robert, secular priest and martyr, 199, 200, 231

INdex

Digby, Kenelm, 9, 21, 47, 49–50, 162 on possession and exorcism, 22, 222–3 on purgatory, 88 on witchcraft, 133 powder of sympathy, 52 divination, 109, 128, 131, 135–6, 137; see also astrology Dodd, Charles, see Tootell, Hugh Dominicans, 45–6, 120, 150, 171, 178, 207, 220 Douai, 174–5, 176 English College at, 7, 10, 17, 43, 65, 100, 165, 200 St Bonaventure’s friary at, 174, 187 St Gregory’s priory at, 177 university of, 132 Douai-Rheims Bible, 84, 126 Draiton, Robert, secular priest, 157 Drury, Robert, Jesuit, 18 Dryden, John, poet, 57 Dudley, Robert, Earl of Essex, 135 Duffy, Eamon, historian, 2, 3, 7, 28, 34, 59, 60 Dunkirk, 174 Durham, County, 206, 232 Dutch Republic, see Low Countries Edinburgh, 104, 114 Elizabeth, Queen of England, 2, 86, 137 accused of witchcraft, 132 plots to kill by magic, 134–6, 140 Elmer, Peter, historian, 3, 14, 118, 142, 144, 164 Emancipation, Catholic, see Catholic Relief Acts English Benedictine Congregation, see Benedictines English Convent, see Augustinian Canonesses Enlightenment, 10, 11, 20, 22, 55, 71, 80, 104, 107, 163, 169, 185 English Catholic, xi, 10, 21, 55, 63, 65–6, 72–7, 114, 171, 229 Erasmus, Desiderius, 65, 89, 202 Erskine, Charles, Cardinal, 75

299

Essex, 37, 120, 134, 136, 142–3 Downham, 218 New Hall, 112 St Osyth, 142 Ewen, Cecil L’Estrange, historian, 140 exorcism, xi, 9, 23, 26, 37, 58, 76, 120, 122, 161, 162, 171, 189, 231–3; see also possession, demonic at baptism, 181, 187, 225 as evangelism, 8, 22, 100, 189, 203–9 as healing, 16, 36, 189 as unbewitching, 152, 154, 156, 173, 175–6, 189–90 by laypersons, 219–20 by missionary priests, 4, 16, 17, 18, 32, 35, 101, 124, 153, 158, 191–2, 197–203, 226–9 by Protestants, 15–16, 27, 37, 121, 165–6, 192–4, 196, 224, 226 faked by Catholics, 121, 146, 149, 192 in folklore, 219–22 of haunted houses, 22, 93, 95, 191, 217–9, 223 of nuns, 209–16 rites of, 22, 37, 176, 194–5 use of blessed objects and relics in, 62–3, 143, 147, 155, 191, 194, 205 fairies, 1, 35, 66, 94, 159, 168, 229 in anti-Catholic literature, 35, 160 in magic, 157, 160 familiars, 120, 143, 156, 157, 196 Farrer, Edmund, historian, 106, 107, 108 Fenderlin, Giles, murderer, 158 Fénelon, François, theologian, 65 Fermor, Arabella, society beauty, 1, 65 Ferraud, Ambrose, Benedictine monk, 216 fideism, 29, 53, 60, 61, 65, 172 Filmer, Robert, political philosopher, 119 Fisher, John, bishop of Rochester, 39–40

300

ENgLisH CatHoLics aNd tHe SuPerNaturaL, 1553–1829

Fisher, John, Jesuit, 92 folklore, 1, 20, 89, 122, 131, 149, 169, 200, 220–22 Forster, Christine, Benedictine nun, 123 Forster, Thomas Ignatius, author, 114–15 fortune-telling, see divination Fouqaire, Mr, secular priest, 112 Foxe, John, martyrologist, 28, 56, 207 France; see also Douai; French exiled clergy; French Revolution; Paris; St Germain-en-Laye; St Omer changing attitudes to witchcraft in, 22, 131, 149, 150, 166, 171–5, 178, 186, 187 English Catholics in, 8, 19, 59, 166, 171 exorcism in, 117, 224 ghost narratives in, 80–81 reception of Alexander Pope in, 66–7 Franciscans, 48, 174, 194 Frederick, Prince of Wales, 224 Freemasonry, 64 French exiled clergy, 71, 111–12 French Revolution, 74, 111, 112 functionalism, 15, 23, 81 Gadbury, John, astrologer, 57, 162 Gage family, 104–8, 113 Gallicanism, 10, 32, 59–60, 73, 172 Gardiner, Stephen, bishop of Winchester, 41 Gaskill, Malcolm, historian, 14, 141, 142 Gaufridy, Louis, reputed witch, 150, 178 Gee, John, author, 17, 18, 19, 90–93, 95, 147, 151, 158, 193–4 gentry, Catholic, 6, 8, 20, 36, 104, 112, 147, 163, 170, 188, 190 Gerard, John, Jesuit, 18, 84n., 101–2 ghosts, xi, xii, 3, 4, 5, 13, 17, 19, 25, 45, 49, 56, 57, 63, 79–80, 159, 220; see also exorcism; haunted

houses; poltergeists; Samuel, ghost of and purgatory, see purgatory Catholic beliefs about, 9, 14, 52, 82–9, 95–6, 108–9, 114–15 exorcism of, see exorcism faked by Catholics, 18, 89–93, 96–7, 147 folklore about, 97–100 images of, 103–8 in fiction, 79, 109–10 narratives about, 2, 4, 13, 14, 20, 21, 80–82, 93–5, 100–103, 110–14, 170, 223 Gillow, Joseph, historian, 99, 100 Glanvill, Joseph, author, 56, 82 Glastonbury thorn, 57 Glickman, Gabriel, historian, 3, 59, 60, 209 Godfrey, Edmund, murder victim, 57 Gother, John, author, 60 Gothic literature, 13, 79, 80, 97, 109–10 grave robbing, 183 Greek, 37, 38, 166, 183, 194, 221 Greenwood, Gregory, Benedictine monk, xii, 22, 63, 70, 173, 176–88, 191, 225, 226 Grindal, Edmund, archbishop of Canterbury, 89, 135, 137 Gunpowder Plot, 32, 49, 57, 59, 149 Guyot, Pierre-François, author, 66 Haigh, Christopher, historian, 12, 33, 34–5, 141 Hallett, Nicky, historian, 16, 124, 190, 209 Hamilton, Anthony, author, 7, 168, 169 Hampshire, 203, 232 Winchester, 75, 134, 219, 232 Handley, Sasha, historian, 3, 13, 14, 63, 79, 80, 96, 111, 114, 115 Hands, Edward, secular priest, 194 Harpsfield, Nicholas, author, 11, 28, 38 Harsnett, Samuel, archbishop of York, 17, 18, 91, 158, 191, 193, 197–201, 202, 204, 208

INdex

haunted houses 22, 81, 98, 153, 217–20, 223; see also exorcism; ghosts Hawarden, Caryl, 62 Haydock family, 99–100, 169 Heatley, Maurus, Benedictine monk, 216 Helmont, Jan Baptista van, natural philosopher, 52 Henrietta Maria, Queen of England, 50, 65 Hermetic Corpus, 45, 52 Herrick, Robert, poet, 160 Heskyns, Thomas, author, 31 high churchmen, 4, 53, 56, 57, 63, 119, 164, 165, 187, 224; see also Non-Jurors Hobbes, Thomas, philosopher, 50, 89 Hogarde, Miles, 7, 27–8 Holden, Henry, scholar, 50, 61 Hole, Christina, folklorist, 220 Holland, see Low Countries holy water, 93, 144, 155, 177, 181, 183, 187, 188, 196, 200, 202, 203, 204, 205, 208, 217, 225, 226, 227; see also water of St Ignatius Holywell, 35, 36, 76n. Hooke, Luke Joseph, theologian, 69–70, 74 Hooke, Nathaniel, historian, 66 Hopkins, Matthew, witchfinder, 121, 141 How, Richard, 104 Howard, Anne, demoniac, 176, 231n. Huddlestone family, 170 humanism, 21, 28, 45, 68, 69, 190 Huntingdonshire Warboys, 121 Hutchinson, Francis, author, 163, 164, 179, 201 Inchbald, Elizabeth, playwright, 13n., 73, 108–9 incubi, 46, 150, 180, 183, 184, 185 Ireland, 7, 11, 60, 66, 71–2, 126, 166, 170, 219, 229

301

Ireland, Alexander, Jesuit, 90n., 91 Jacobitism, 7, 9, 10, 14, 60, 63, 64, 69, 71, 166–9 James I (VI of Scotland), King of England, 86, 128–9, 132, 149, 197 James II, King of England, 9, 57, 60, 162, 166, 167, 168, 209 Jansen, Cornelius, theologian, 7 Jansenism in England, 10, 21, 32, 54, 55, 58, 59–61, 63, 65, 74, 209 in Europe, 10, 58, 59, 61–2, 65, 75, 172, 176, 177, 178, 208 Jenks, Rowland, bookseller, 139 Jerningham family, 99, 110–12, 114 Jesuits, 7–8, 9, 10, 16, 18, 21, 22, 26, 32, 33, 36, 48, 49, 51, 52, 55, 58–9, 60, 61, 62–3, 68, 69, 73, 75, 81, 87, 90, 91, 93, 96, 97, 100, 101, 119, 120, 121, 123, 146, 147, 151, 155–6, 158, 164, 169, 171, 176, 178, 183, 189, 191, 192, 193, 194, 196, 197, 199–200, 202, 203–6, 207, 208–9, 214, 215, 217, 218, 220, 221, 228 Johnson, Nathaniel, author,167 Johnstone, Nathan, historian, 40, 41, 134, 210 Jones, Norman, historian, 14, 118–19, 134, 135, 136 Jones, Zachary, author, 86 Julian of Norwich, mystic, 65 Julian the Apostate, Roman Emperor, 29, 182–3, 184 Keating, George, publisher, 227 Kelly, Edward, medium, 160, 161–2 Kenlish, Michael, shoemaker, 170–71 Kent, 205, 232 Knowles, Gilbert, Benedictine monk, 71 Labre, Joseph Benedict, saint, 75 Lambe, John, astrologer, 139

302

ENgLisH CatHoLics aNd tHe SuPerNaturaL, 1553–1829

Lambspring, Abbey of, 216 Lancashire, 35, 36, 85, 102, 121, 141, 147, 148, 149, 150, 169, 174, 192, 195, 201, 207, 209; see also Lancashire witches Appleton, 62 Browsholme, 99 Calverley, 97n. Chingle, 98 Claughton, 104 Cleworth, 192 Colne, 220 Cottam, 100 Huddington, 98n. Ince Blundell, 98 Lancaster, 144, 148 Lostock, 97n. Mowbreck, 99–100 Orrel, 202, 233 Pendle, 148 Samlesbury, 97, 144, 145 Wardley, 99 Warrington, 141 Lancashire witches, 22, 141, 144–51, 156, 178 Laski, Albert, 161 Latin as language of Catholic education, 7, 8–9, 43–4 limitations of, 131 used in charms and magic, 13, 33, 36–7, 136, 142, 146–7, 148, 157 Latitudinarianism, 63, 181, 185 Lavater, Ludwig, demonologist, 81, 85–6 Lebrun, Pierre, theologian, 55, 172–3 Leech, Humphrey, author, 42, 128–9 Leibniz, Gottfried, philosopher, 51, 180 Leicestershire, 94 Belvoir Castle, 121 Leslie, Charles, author, 169–70 Leslie, Shane, author, 2 Lespagnol, Marie, reputed witch, 174–5 Lessius, Leonard, theologian, 86

Leyburn, George, secular priest, 61, 165n. Lierre, Carmelites of, see Carmelites Lilly, William, astrologer, 37, 162 Lingard, John, historian, 72, 76 Lisbon English College at, 50, 51, 88 Lodge, Thomas, author, 85, 88, 126, 127 Lofthouse, Jessica, folklorist, 98, 148 London, 20, 50, 57, 71, 90, 103, 110, 112, 113, 161, 170, 192, 205, 231–2 Blackfriars, 18 Canon Row, 198 Clerkenwell, 188 Covent Garden, 160 Drury Lane, 92 Great Fire of, 87 Hammersmith, 113 Holborn, 155, 232 Old Bailey, 108 St Paul’s Cathedral, 30, 139 Strand, 154, 188 Tower of, 138 Tyburn, 159 Westminster, 19, 193 Loudun, exorcisms at, 209, 223 Louis XIV, King of France, 61, 167 Louvain, University of, 129, 130, 131, 132 Low Countries, 8, 19, 51, 58, 61, 132, 158, 171, 176, 208, 209 Lowes, John, reputed witch, 142 MacFarlane, Alan, historian, 14, 126, 141, 142 McManners, John, historian, 171, 187 madness, 197, 204, 216 magic, 12, 15, 17, 26, 29, 30–31, 34, 36–7, 39, 46–7, 85, 117–18, 119, 126, 127, 128–31, 132–3, 134–6, 137, 139–40, 141, 143, 146, 147, 150, 152–3, 157–62, 168, 171, 172, 173, 184, 189, 193, 201, 203, 221, 224; see also cunning-folk

INdex

Mainy, Richard, demoniac, 198, 231 Malleus Maleficarum, 46, 120, 129, 152 Manners family, 121 Marie des Anges, abbess of Maubuison, 62 mariology, see Mary, Virgin Marshall, Peter, historian, 3, 4, 13, 14, 79, 80, 81–2, 84 Martiall, John, author, 11, 28–9, 42, 127, 129, 152, 183 Martin, Gregory, translator, 84, 128 martyrologies, see martyrs martyrs Catholic, 5, 19, 28, 30, 32, 36, 39, 62, 98, 99, 171, 193–4, 199, 200, 201–2, 203–4, 205, 207, 214 Protestant, 27, 28, 137 Marwood, Nicholas, demoniac, 198, 231 Mary, Queen of Scots, 101 Mary I, Queen of England, 7, 39, 41, 126, 136, 161 Mary of Modena, Queen of England, 60 Mary, Virgin, 5, 41, 92, 122–3, 152, 193, 211–16, 217 Matthew, David, archbishop of Apamea, 98 mechanism, 10, 23, 45, 47, 50, 51, 68, 165 Menghi, Girolamo, exorcist, 194, 200–201 Mersenne, Marin, philosopher, 49 Methodism, 4, 22, 164, 166, 221, 224, 229 Michaelis, Sebastian, inquisitor, xii, 150, 178–87 Milner, John, Vicar Apostolic, 20, 75–6, 227–8, 229 Milton, John, poet, 43–4, 65 miracles, 5, 9, 10, 11, 19, 21, 25, 26, 27–8, 29–30, 32, 35, 36, 42, 52, 56–7, 58, 69–70, 74–6, 85, 87, 90, 124, 126, 127–8, 129, 176, 190, 215, 229 Molineux, Thomas, martyr, 193

303

Molyneux, Richard, magistrate, 201 More, Anne, canoness, 41 More, George, author, 201 More, Henry, philosopher, 49, 205 More, Mary, canoness, 107 More, Thomas, martyr, 45 More, Thomas, secular priest, 102 Morse, Henry, Jesuit martyr, 205, 214 mortalism, 48, 49 Morwen, John, 30 Mostyn, Elizabeth, demoniac, 153, 173, 209–15 Mostyn, Margaret, demoniac, 94, 124, 152, 153, 173, 209–15 Mumford, James, Jesuit, 87 mystery plays, 148 mysticism, 39–40, 41, 52, 65, 122–4, 193, 209, 212, 216–17 natural magic, see magic Nechils, Thomas, recusant, 153 Nelson, John, secular priest, 194, 231 Neoplatonism, 40, 49, 51, 52, 65, 131, 221 Netherlands, see Low Countries Newstead Abbey, 106–7 Newtonianisn, see mechanism Non-Jurors, 53, 165–6 Norfolk, 204, 232 Costessey, 99 Norwich, 110 Northamptonshire Lyveden, 39 Rushton, 38 Northumberland Corbridge, 207 Hexham, 220 nuns Augustinian Canonesses, 19, 41, 94, 106, 107, 112, 176 Benedictine, 113, 122–3, 127 Carmelite, 16, 19, 22, 41, 93, 94, 123–4, 153, 168, 173, 176, 209–15 Oath of Allegiance, see Allegiance, Oath of

304

ENgLisH CatHoLics aNd tHe SuPerNaturaL, 1553–1829

obsession, demonic, see possession, demonic O’Donnell, Elliott, author, 99 Oldridge, Darren, historian, 40, 120, 158, 206 Orton, Elizabeth, visionary, 19, 23 Osborne, Ruth, reputed witch, 166 Osmund, Elizabeth, Carmelite nun, 168, 176 Our Lady, see Mary, Virgin Oxford, Earl of, 134 Oxford Movement, 11 Oxford University, 37, 45, 46, 126, 129, 135, 165, 207 Gloucester Hall, 49, 161 Oxfordshire Brize Norton, 177 Oxford, 28, 139 pacification of feuds, 189 papalism, see Ultramontanism Paracelsanism, see vitalism Paris, 17, 49, 60, 74, 216 cemetery of St Medard in, 60, 62 English College at, 59 St Edmund’s priory at, 69, 74 University of (Sorbonne), 50, 59, 61, 69, 171, 172 Pâris, François de, deacon, 62, 75 Parish, Mary, cunning-woman, 158–60, 219–20 Parsons, Robert, Jesuit author, 11, 18, 86, 132, 137–9, 140, 143, 167, 195 Pascal, Blaise, philosopher, 61, 65 Peach, Edward, exorcist, 16, 226–9 Peard, Frances, 92–3 Pendle witches, see Lancashire witches Percy, Henry, Earl of Northumberland, 161 Percy, Mary, Benedictine abbess, 123 Perry, William, demoniac, 16, 147, 153–4, 191, 201–2, 203 Plowden family, 111 Pole, Arthur, pretender, 134, 135 Pole, Reginald, archbishop of Canterbury, 7

Polidori, John William, author, 109–10 poltergeists, 99, 170, 191, 226 Pomponazzi, Pietro, philosopher, 45 Pope, Alexander, poet, 10, 21, 72, 73, 114, 169 Essay on Man, 67–8, 163, 180–81 Sandys’s Ghost, 114n. The Rape of the Lock, 1, 43n., 64–7 The Six Maidens, 224–5 Popish Plot, 57, 59, 134 popular religion, 1, 3, 12, 33–4, 36, 156; see also sub-Catholic Porter, Dunstan, Benedictine monk, 216 Porter, Roy, historian, 163, 179 Portugal, 8, 171 possession, demonic, xi, 5, 15, 22, 23, 24, 41, 44, 62, 63, 85, 117, 121, 122, 124, 147, 149, 151, 154–6, 165–6, 170, 173–4, 175, 176, 189–92, 195, 196–8, 200–201, 202–9, 211–12, 214–17, 222–6, 228–9 possession, divine, 19, 193–4 Potts, Thomas, author, 146–7, 150–51 predestination, 40, 43, 59, 60, 61, 206 Prescott, Henry, Jacobite, 63 preternatural, xi, 4–5, 25, 26, 46, 56, 134 Price, Cicely, Benedictine nun, 123 Prince, Anne, demoniac, 155, 232 printing, see books, English Catholic prophesying, 122, 135, 137, 192 providence, 5, 11, 30, 42, 53, 56–7, 63, 81, 86, 96, 99n., 102, 114, 152, 180, 181, Prynne, William, author, 122 Pugh, Robert, Jesuit, 51 purgatory, 9, 21, 24, 26, 35, 52, 61, 79–83, 84–5, 87–8, 89–97, 98, 100–103, 223 puritanism, 15, 40, 59, 114, 121, 122, 127, 130, 140, 141, 143, 144, 192, 197, 224 Purkiss, Diane, historian, 12, 37, 148 Quesnel, Pasquier, theologian, 60

INdex

Questier, Michael, historian, 6 Quinet, Louis, Cistercian monk, 62 Rainolds, William, author, 31 Ramsay, Andrew, author, 66 Raymond, Thomas, lawyer, 218 recusancy, 2, 6, 8, 33, 34, 36, 38, 65, 90, 92, 125, 134, 136, 137, 141, 142–3, 144, 145, 146–7, 149, 153, 159, 162, 197, 201, 203, 209, 219 relics, 27, 32, 36, 76, 99, 120, 197, 200, 205, 214 Restoration of the monarchy, 9, 50, 51, 140, 162 Reuchlin, Johannes, see cabala Riolan, Jean, physician, 53 Rodriquez, Alfonso, spiritual author, 123 Rogers, John, martyr, 27 romanticism, 73, 74, 107, 109 Rome, 8, 58, 102, 203 English College at, 130, 151 Rookwood family, 68, 84, 104, 107–8, 113, 125n., 141 Rosicrucianism, 64–5, 66 Royal Society, 50, 52, 57, 70, 162 Rudall, John, exorcist, 37, 221 Rudgley, John, seminarian, 130, 150, 152, 154 Rushton Triangular Lodge, see Triangular Lodge Rushworth, William, theologian, 52 Russell, Jeffrey Burton, historian, 40–41, 44, 46, 131, Sabbath, witches’, 46, 119, 122, 149, 150, 172, 183, 185 Sabran, Lewis, Jesuit, 176 sacramentals, 5, 22, 29, 36, 182, 194, 195, 196, 205 sacrilege, 13, 98–9, 108, 167 St Germain-en-Laye, 9, 50, 166, 168 St Omer, Jesuit College at, 17, 65, 73, 174 St Patrick’s Purgatory, 126 St Teresa of Avila, 41

305

Salkeld, John, theologian, 48n. Salmon, Patrick, 101 Samlesbury witches, see Lancashire witches Samuel, ghost of, 53, 83–4 Satan, see devil, the scepticism, 5, 57, 76, 104, 120, 163, 166, 174, 228 in English Catholicism, 7, 9, 11, 21, 22, 25, 29, 38, 46, 49, 52, 63, 64, 74, 77, 89, 114–15, 133, 164, 176, 222–3 in English Protestantism, 28, 37, 61, 91, 121, 140, 144, 164, 165, 193 in French Catholicism, 22, 53, 171 Scholasticism see Aristotelianism Scot, Reginald, author, 15, 37, 91, 140, 143, 144, 147, 157, 164, 193 Scotism, see Aristotelianism Scott, Geoffrey, historian, xi, 3, 69, 186, 188 Scott, Walter, novelist, 97 secular priests, 7, 9, 18, 21, 32, 33, 35, 42, 50, 58, 61, 63, 71, 74, 102, 130, 151, 158, 165, 176, 189, 192, 194, 196, 199, 200, 204, 207, 208–9, 225 seminary priests, see secular priests Sergeant, John, philosopher, 9, 49, 50, 59n., 87, 167–8, 169 Shakespeare, William Hamlet, 13, 106 King Lear, 16, 197 Macbeth, 143 rural plays, 35 Shell, Alison, historian, 13, 32, 64, 66, 83, 104 Shelley, Mary, novelist, 110 Shilton, Meg, reputed witch, 169 Short, Richard, physician, 59n., 60, 61 Shropshire Acton Burnell, 98 skulls, screaming, 99, 100, 108 Smith, Richard, Vicar Apostolic, 50

306

ENgLisH CatHoLics aNd tHe SuPerNaturaL, 1553–1829

Society of Jesus, see Jesuits Society of St Edmund, 70–71, 74 sorcery, see magic soul, 40, 41, 42, 50, 72, 89, 90, 93, 181, 203, 228 powers of, 26, 48–9, 88, 126, 166 of the dead, 26, 45, 48, 82, 84, 85, 86–7, 94, 95, 96, 98, 101, 102 of the world, see vitalism Southgate, Beverley, historian, 50, 53, 61 Southwell, Robert, Jesuit martyr, 193 Southworth, Christopher, secular priest, 36, 145–6, 149, 150–51 Southworth, Jane, reputed witch, 144 Southworth, John, 97, 144, 145 Sowerbutts, Grace, witness, 36, 144, 147, 149, 150, 156, 178 Spain, 8, 122, 124, 132 Spelman, Henry, author, 99 spirituality, see mysticism Staffordshire, 101–2 Bilson (Bilston), 18, 153–4 Cannock, 93 Staffordshire Creed, 76 Stapleton, Thomas, theologian, 11, 15, 38, 200 on the devil, 43, 152, 155 on witchcraft, 46, 129–32, 143 sceptical of miracles, 28, 56 Starkie, Nicholas, 192, 195 Stearne, John, witchfinder, 121, 141 Stillingfleet, Edward, bishop of Worcester, 65 Stourton, Lord, 99, 100–101 Stowe, John, antiquary, 139 Suárez, Francisco, theologian, 48–9 sub-Catholic, 6, 13, 33–4, 36–7, 71, 142, 146, 148 succubi, 46, 150, 180, 183, 184, 185 Suffolk, 108, 120, 121, 141, 206, 232 Beyton, 123 Bury St Edmunds, 142 Eye, 142 Flixton, 103–4 Hengrave, 104, 107, 108, 113 Hintlesham, 141

Stanningfield (Coldham), 84, 105–8, 125n. suicide, 149, 158, 206–7 supernatural, definition of, 1–2, 3, 4–5, 11–17, 26–7, 31–2, 44, 46 superstition, xi, 10, 11–12, 21, 25, 26–7, 32, 35, 36, 65, 66, 70, 71, 74, 76, 96, 107, 109, 118, 128, 156, 164, 166, 173, 220, 226 Alexander Pope on, 67–8, 72 Catholics accused of, 63, 64, 73, 83, 139, 147–8, 163, 193, 228 Counter-Reformation criticisms of, 30–31, 55, 194 Jansenist attitude towards, 58, 172 Protestants accused of, 27, 30, 114–15 survivalism, Catholic, see sub-Catholic Swine, Edmond, soldier, 154, 232 Syriac, 37, 221 Taillepied, Noel, demonologist, 81, 85 Tasburgh family, 103–4 Taylor, Zacchary, author, 96, 202–3, 208 Thiers, Jean-Baptiste, author, 173, 188 Thomas, Keith, historian, 3, 36, 81, 117, 125–6, 152 Thomism, see Aristotelianism Thompson, Christopher, see Southworth, Christopher Throckmorton family, 177–8, 218 Thuragh, John, 161 Thyraeus, Peter, demonologist, 81, 155, 217, 219 Timperley family, 141 toleration, religious, 9, 10, 50, 77, 209 Tootell, Hugh (alias Charles Dodd), historian, 60, 178 Toryism, 57, 64 transubstantiation, 9, 51, 91 Travers, Bede, Carmelite friar, 18, 62, 95, 161, 164, 208, 216, 218–19, 223 treason, 135, 137, 138 treasure hunting, 118, 125, 157–8, 207, 220

INdex

Trent, Council of, 7, 32, 45, 58, 83, 84, 87, 189, 194 Tresham, Thomas, recusant, 38–9, 46 Trevor-Davies, Reginald, historian, 14, 140–41 Triangular Lodge, 38, 39 Tymms, Samuel, antiquary, 107 Tyrell, Anthony, informant, 18, 198, 199, 200, 231 Ultramontanism, 10, 32, 58, 72, 74, 75, 76, 77, 227, 228 unbewitching, see exorcism Unigenitus, see Jansenism Usher, James, educationalist, 72–3, 109 Vair, Leonard, demonologist, 129 Vanini, Lucio, philosopher, 45 Vaux family, 91, 198 Vaux, Laurence, 127 Venard, Marc, 185–6 Villars, Pierre Henri de, 64, 67 Villiers, Mary, Countess of Buckingham, 139 visions, 1, 5, 19, 20, 24, 25, 28, 61, 69, 88, 89, 92, 95, 96, 100– 101, 103, 112, 122, 123, 124, 212, 216 vitalism, 45, 47, 49, 52, 64–5, 67 Waardt, Hans de, historian, 208–9 Wainman, Christopher, Jesuit, 90n., 92, 158 Wake, William, archbishop of Canterbury, 71 Walker, Claire, historian, 123, 124 Walker, D. P., historian, 15, 192 Wall, John, Franciscan martyr, 98 Walpole, Horace, novelist, 79 Walsh, John, reputed sorcerer, 152, 157 Walsham, Alexandra, 4, 5, 6, 11, 12, 16, 18, 28, 30, 32, 33, 34, 36, 41, 189, 190, 195, 203 Walshman, Thomas, 145 Warwickshire, 112, 186, 187, 188

307

Coughton, 177 Waterhouse, Agnes, reputed witch, 37, 126, 136–7, 142 water of St. Ignatius, 22, 62, 155, 204–5; see also holy water Watson, Thomas, bishop of Lincoln, 41 Wells Cathedral, 41 Wesley, Charles, evangelist, 165–6 Wesley, John, evangelist,166, 226 Westmoreland, 155, 232 Kirkby Lonsdale, 220 Weston, John Baptist, Franciscan friar, 175 Weston, William, exorcist, 16–18, 143, 158, 191, 197–200, 204, 231 Weyer, Johann, demonologist, 210 Whall, George, Benedictine monk, 216 Wharton, Goodwin, politician, 159–60, 220 Wheeler, Mr, exorcist, 153, 202, 232 Whigs, 54, 57, 63, 158, 163, 166 White, Mrs, demoniac, 226–8 White, Thomas, philosopher, 8, 9, 21, 47, 49, 51–2, 61, 114, 222 on ghosts, 52–3, 87–9 on purgatory, 48, 52, 87 on witchcraft, 52, 133 political views, 50 Whitmore, George, highwayman, 159 Whittell, Roger Joseph, secular priest, 71 Wilberforce, Samuel, bishop of Winchester, 99 Wilks, Joseph Cuthbert, Benedictine monk, 74 William III, King of England, 165, 167 Williams, Friswood, demoniac, 197, 198, 200, 231 Williams, Sara, demoniac, 197–8, 231 witchcraft; see also Lancashire witches, Witchcraft Acts as devil worship, 119–20, 150, 152, 180, 186 as metaphor for heresy, 128–9, 132–3, 167, 169 as metaphor for treason, 167, 170

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ENgLisH CatHoLics aNd tHe SuPerNaturaL, 1553–1829

as pact with the devil, 118, 120, 122, 125, 126, 127, 130–31, 135–6, 143, 157, 158, 172, 206 bewitchment, xi, 16, 17, 121, 165, 166, 170, 171, 173, 174–6, 189–90, 202, 206, 211, 214, 226, 228; see also possession, demonic Catholics accused of, 14–15, 22, 91, 117, 123–4, 134–44 Catholic attitudes towards, 9, 14, 17, 22, 29, 36, 43, 52–3, 55, 117, 119–21, 125–8, 130, 150, 151–6, 171–3, 177–88, 225 definition of, 23, 25, 117–18 in folklore, 169, 196 in literature, 166–8 Latin words for, 130–31 Protestant attitudes towards, 4, 56, 57, 118, 120–21, 122, 157, 163–4, 165–6, 193 scepticism of, 133–4, 163 spectral, 132

witch-hunting, 15, 22, 45–6, 120, 141–3, 149, 166, 171, 179, 192 Witchcraft Acts of 1542, 118 of 1563, 83, 118, 134–5, 157 of 1604, 118, 141, 148, 157, 165, 179, 187 of 1736, 64, 163, 165, 179, 187 Woodhead, Abraham, author, 56–7 Woodward, Mathias, Franciscan friar, 174–5, 187 Worcestershire Halfcote, 93, 217, 232 King’s Norton, 226–7, 233 Worthington, Thomas, Dominican friar, 207 Wren, Matthew, bishop of Ely, 142 Yepes, Diego de, historian, 18, 194, 200, 203, 207 Yorkshire, 220 Yoward, Richard, Benedictine monk, 216