CHAPTER 15
The Chelmsford Witch Trials
In spite of the Malleus Maleficarum and the Bull of Innocent VIII, the witchcraft fever took a long time to spread across Europe; in the first half of the 16th century, there were only occasional cases—like the werewolves of Poligny (see chapter on Werewolves) or the trial of the unfortunate Madame Desle la Mansenée at Luxeuil in 1529, when the Inquisition seems to have based its case on the hearsay evidence of neighbours. Martin Luther and John Calvin had more to do with the rise of the witchcraft fever than the various Popes who issued bulls against it. The Church once again felt itself to be seriously challenged—as in the 13th century, by the Cathars. In France in 1557, forty witches were burned at Toulouse—centre of the Catharist heresy. Witchcraft came to England with the witchcraft bill passed under Queen Elizabeth in 1563. At Chelmsford in 1566, three women were charged with different acts of witchcraft, the only connection being that they all came from the same village, Hatfield Peverell. In the case of one of these women, Elizabeth Francis, the evidence suggests that she was, indeed, a witch. She was accused of bewitching a child and making it ill, and seems to have admitted openly that she had learned witchcraft from her grandmother at the age of twelve, and that she had a ‘familiar’, a cat called Sathan, which bewitched people for her. She told how she had wanted to marry a man named William Byles, and how her cat had advised her to seduce him, which she did; however he still declined to marry her, so she allowed the cat to kill him by witchcraft. She claimed that the cat had helped her abort Byles’s child, and that had later advised her to sleep with a yeoman named Christopher Francis and get herself pregnant; Francis married her. Oddly enough, Elizabeth Francis was sentenced to only one year in prison.
Another woman charged with her—Agnes Waterhouse—was less lucky, she confessed to attempting to bewitch a neighbour named William Fynee to death and to attempting to bewitch another neighbour without success. (She had been given the cat Sathan by Elizabeth Francis.) Mother Waterhouse (as she was known) was hanged—the first woman in England to be hanged for witchcraft. Her daughter Joan, was found not guilty of bewitching a girl. But Elizabeth Francis was to appear before the same court on two future occasions, charged with witchcraft; on the second she received another year in jail, and on the third, was hanged.
In 1582 there was another famous witch trial at Chelmsford—selected by the sceptic Reginald Scot, author of The Discovery of Witchcraft—as a typical example of the witchcraft delusion; however, Scot gets his figures wrong—he says there were seventeen or eighteen women executed, whereas there were only two.
The case began with a quarrel between an old woman named Ursula Kempe, a nurse and midwife, and a woman named Grace Thorlowe. Mrs Thorlowe refused to hire Ursula Kempe to nurse her new born daughter, and when the child fell out of her cot and broke her neck, Grace suspected Ursula of maleficia (black witchcraft). Some time after, Grace refused to pay Ursula for her help in alleviating her arthritis on the grounds that it had been ineffective—the pains had come back. Grace complained to a county sessions judge for whom she worked, and Ursula Kempe was arrested and charged with witchcraft. She admitted to some ‘white witchcraft’—simple healing—and was finally induced to confess to maleficia when the Judge, Bryan Darcy, hinted at clemency if she confessed and execution if she didn’t. Thereupon Ursula Kempe confessed to many acts of witchcraft, such as destroying cattle and bewitching a woman to death; she also confessed to causing the cradle of the dead child to overturn, and to bewitching the child of another woman who had accompanied Grace to complain to the magistrate. She went on to accuse a dozen other people of being involved in witchcraft with her. Some confessed, some insisted they were not guilty. Children were brought into court to describe their mother’s ‘imps’ or familiars. ‘The said Ursula Kemple had four spyrites, viz. Tetty a hee like a gray cat, Jacke a hee like a black cat, Pygin a shee like a black toad, and Tyffin a she like a white lambe..’
The court seems to have shown remarkably good sense, discharging eleven of the accused, and hanging only two, including Ursula—who had been promised clemency.
The trial has been strongly condemned by many who have written about it—on legal grounds—and it is true that the court accepted evidence that we would regard as completely inadmissible. Yet it is important to try to put ourselves in the minds of the people involved. A baby had died of a broken neck after falling out of its crib, and after the mother had quarrelled with a woman who seemed to have genuine powers as a witch (i.e. she had temporarily cured Grace’s athritis). When Grace and a friend went to complain to the magistrate, the friend’s child also became ill with strange swellings of the privy and hind parts, and also died. It must have looked fairly obvious to everyone involved that Ursula Kempe was ‘getting away with murder’.
These events might be compared with an item that appeared in the London Daily Mail on March 6, 1981, describing how all four daughters of Donald Shreeves, of Pexoria, Illinois, had died by violence at different times: the first in a car crash in 1972, the second when she happened to look out of her front door to investigate firing noises, and she was shot through the head by a gangster who had just killed her next door neighbour, the third when she went to Chicago to investigate her sister’s murder—she was found dead in a lift with an overdose of drugs—and the fourth shot by her husband. Donald Shreeves is quoted as saying: ‘What the hell is wrong with us? Did we drink out of the wrong side of the cup, or what?’ Three centuries ago, it would have struck him as a perfectly logical hypothesis that someone had ‘put a hex’ on him. And it may be regarded as one possibility, if we are willing to admit the possibility of maleficia—as do James H. Neal, author of Ju-Ju in My Life and Father Dupreyat, author of Mitsinari (both described in the Introduction) and many others who have had experience of African witchcraft.
On the available evidence, it seems not at all improbable that a great deal of simple witchcraft went on in the Chelmsford area during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, and that some of the witches genuinely tried to use their powers for maleficia. Possibly they succeeded. So while most of us will be inclined to dismiss all the evidence about familiars and demons as hysteria, it is necessary to admit that this may not have been entirely a case of smoke without fire.
There were two more major witch trials at Chelmsford, one in 1589, when ten people were charged with maleficia and four were hanged, and the fourth—the most notorious witch trial of the century, in 1645 (see Matthew Hopkins). In the third trial, the details were so similar to those in the others—toads, cats, black imps, and so on—that there would be no point in going into further detail. But it could be significant that three of the ‘witches’ all made final confessions on the scaffold, when they might have been expected to protest their innocence.
CHAPTER 16
Witchcraft in Germany
In Germany, thousands of people had been executed for witchcraft by the beginning of the seventeenth century, most of them tortured, many burned alive; thousands more would die before the persecutions came to a halt.
In Treves, five women were burned as witches in 1572, but this was only a prelude to the trials that began in 1582. By then, the harvest had been poor for several years, and witches were blamed. (Such troubles often seem to cause witch persecutions; a hundred years later, Massachusetts was having all kinds of political problems when the Salem ‘witch scare’ helped to release the sense of oppression and helplessness.) Between 1587 and 1594, 306 persons were accused of being witches, and they involved another six thousand people in their confessions as accomplices. In his History of Treves Johan Linden, canon of the cathedral, notes: ‘Scarcely any of those who were accused escaped punishment’.
Dietrich Flade, Vice-Governor of Treves and Rector of the university, objected that many of the trials were illegal, and was himself accused as a witch and burned.
Franz Buirmann was a German equivalent of the English ‘witch-finder’ Matthew Hopkins; but there were many like him,
and his career has survived only because Hermann Löher, a humanitarian court official who was forced to flee to Holland, wrote about his personal knowledge of Buirmann in a book published many years later. Löher lived at Rheinbach, near Bonn, a quiet village that had little crime. Buirmann, described as a ‘shrewd man of low birth’, had been appointed itinerant judge and witch-hunter by the Archbishop of Cologne; he was able to claim the property of those he condemned as witches, and as a consequence, became affluent. In 1631 and 1636 he paid two visits to Rheinbach and two nearby villages, and burned 150 people out of 300 households. In further persecutions at Siegburg later the same year, Buirmann even had the executioner burned as a witch.
The German witch persecutions occurred mainly in towns that remained Catholic (like Treves). Other such areas were Strasbourg, Breslau, Fulda, Würzburg and Bamberg. Würzburg and Bamberg were ruled by cousins, one of whom burned 900 people, the other 600. In Bamberg, the witch burning began around 1609, under Bishop von Aschhausen, who in thirteen years burned 300 witches. In another series of trials between 1626 and 1630, 400 people were burned. When the Vice-Chancellor tried stopping the trials, he was accused as a witch and executed with his wife and daughter. (The Prince-Archbishop ignored an order from the Emperor ordering their release.) But the Bamberg trials stopped as abruptly as they had started, in 1630, partly because of the invasion of Leipzig by the Swedish King Gustavus, which gave the instigators of the trials other things to think about, partly because of the continued opposition of the Emperor.
In Würzburg in 1629, the Chancellor described in a letter how he had seen many children executed for intercourse with the devil—their ages ranging from three to fifteen. He adds that it is ‘beyond doubt that in a place called the Fraw Rengberg the Devil in person with 8,000 of his followers held an assembly and celebrated a black mass’. In 1629 there were twenty nine executions totalling 157 persons, many of them children. The Prince-Bishop even had his sole heir, a youth, beheaded as a witch. After this execution, the Prince-Bishop seems to have experienced a change of heart, and instituted commemorative services for the victims. Here, as in Bamberg, the Inquisitors and witch-finders were Jesuits. Prince-Bishop Philip Adolf, the man responsible for all these deaths, is described by one historian as ‘otherwise noble and pious’.
Yet there were waves of revulsion and resistance to all the torture and murder. In 1663, a magistrate and ‘witch-finder’ named Geiss, who had been torturing and burning the citizens of Lindheim for two years, turned his attention to a wealthy miller named Johann Schüler. (Here, as in so many other cases, the basic motive was undoubtedly financial.) Schüler’s wife had borne a stillborn child the previous year, and Geiss forced the midwife to ‘confess’ that they had murdered the child and used the body for witchcraft. The child’s body was exhumed and found to be intact (the midwife alleged it had been cut up), and the midwife and six people she had implicated were burned. Not long after, Geiss persuaded another suspected witch—through torture—to implicate Frau Schüler, who was arrested; an old scar was declared to be a ‘devil’s mark’. Schüler hastened to Würzburg to try to persuade the Dean of the Cathedral to help, but in his absence, Frau Schüler was tortured into confession. On his return, Schüler was thrown into the ‘witch’s tower’ and then tortured into confessing. However, as soon as the torture stopped, he recanted. He was tortured again; again he confessed and recanted. Geiss was preparing to torture him a third time when angry townspeople rioted, and Schüler and other suspected witches managed to escape. They succeeded in getting to Speyer, the seat of the Supreme Court, where the sight of their tortured and scarred bodies—particularly the women—aroused indignation. But in Schüler’s absence, and in spite of popular anger, Geiss burnt Frau Schüler alive. The townspeople rose up in force, and Geiss and his men had to flee. The Dean of Würzburg suggested to Baron Oynhausen—responsible for Geiss’s appointment—that he ought to assuage the popular fury by censuring Geiss, and Oynhausen dismissed him, to Geiss’s indignation—he insisted that he had only been doing his duty.
The Protestant states executed less witches, and ceased the witchcraft persecutions, earlier than Catholic states; in Prussia, King Frederick William put a stop to witch trials in 1714. The last execution for witchcraft in Germany took place in 1775.
Why were the witch trials so widespread in Germany—more than in any other country? Rossell Hope Robbins comments; ‘Germany was the land of torture ...’ and cites a case in Tettwang, near Constance, in 1608, when a father died in prison from torture, his wife was hoisted in the strappado eleven times (a device for dislocating the shoulders), and their 29 year old daughter was also hoisted eleven times with a fifty pound weight attached to her legs. The torturer allowed her to recover for ten weeks before subjecting her to more torture—not out of mercy, but because he was afraid she would die under it.
The case of Buirmann and Geiss makes it obvious that many of the ‘witch-finders’ were sexual sadists, for whom the persecutions were an opportunity to give free rein to their impulses. (Criminologists have noted that Germany has a higher percentage of mass murders and sadistic murders than any other country—although in the past few decades America is beginning to catch up.) The rise of Protestantism in Germany also seems to explain a great deal (although some cities that persecuted witches—like Leipzig—were Protestant) as the Catholic Church struggled to regain its authority through a reign of terror.
A suspect being subjected to the strappado, a device for dislocating the joints.
CHAPTER 17
Gilles de Rais
Like the Marquis de Sade, Gilles de Rais remains one of those symbolic figures whose significance continues to trouble us even after we have dismissed him as a self-indulgent sadist.
Born in 1404, Gilles became the richest nobleman in Europe but he was also spoilt, imperious and destructive. He was obsessed with the excesses of the Romans Tiberius and Caligula and strove to emulate their lifestyles, not only copying them in extravagance but also in sexual deviance and debauchery with a preference for young children, enlisting the help of his cousins and others to procure and later kill the children involved. When Gilles was 25, he met Joan of Arc and became fascinated with her boyish figure and, in effect, fell in love with her. But after fighting bravely by her side he stood by and watched her condemed to be burnt as a witch. In The Witch Cult in Western Europe, Margaret Murray states her conviction that both Gilles and Joan of Arc were members of the ‘Dianic Cult’, and this is why he made no attempt to rescue the maid—she was a sacrifice, a martyr for the Old Religion. After her death, Gilles returned to his estates and began putting into practice his dreams of being one of the Caesars.
His financial excess finally began to drain even his great resources and at some point Gilles decided he ought to try repairing his fortunes by alchemy—turning base metals into gold. He seems to have read a book on alchemy as early as 1426. About ten years later, when Gilles’s fortunes were plunging, he asked one of his employees, a priest named Blanchet, to find him a magician—although it seems that his cousin de Sillé had already introduced him to a number of practitioners of the black arts. Few results were obtained—although one magician named Fontenelle succeeded in invoking twenty crowns, and claimed that he had invoked a demon named Barron.
Magicians in those days were convinced that magical acts were performed through the agency of the Devil and his legions; so there can be no doubt that Gilles believed he was endangering his soul—playing a more dangerous game than any so far. And he was terrified of the consequences. At the castle of Tiffauges, Gilles and his cousin de Sillé locked themselves in a basement with a magician to perform magic; the magician warned him solemnly not to make the sign of the cross, or he would be in great danger. At a certain point, Gilles and his cousin fled from the room, and heard thumping noises behind them. Looking into the room, they found that the magician had apparently been badly beaten ‘so hurt that he could hardly stand up’; they were afraid that he would die, but h
e recovered. So Gilles was convinced he was dealing with the powers of hell—although he later insisted that he had resolutely refused to sell his soul to the Devil. When one magician drowned on his way to the castle, and another died soon after he arrived, Gilles took these to be signs and warnings. Yet he now needed money so badly that there seemed no way to retreat. Occasionally, he toyed with the idea of making a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and confessing all his sins; but the attraction of his favourite sexual indulgences was too strong.
The priest Blanchet was sent to Italy in 1439 in search of more magicians; he found a ‘clerk in minor orders’ called François Prelati, who claimed to be an alchemist. Prelati seems to have been a young man, about twenty three, who set determinedly about trying to invoke the Devil, as well as the demon Barron. He himself received a violent beating from the demons on one occasion—unless, as seems probable, the episode was staged to convince Gilles that the experiments were not entirely a fraud.
Gilles became deeply depressed. He now committed the act that was to cause his downfall. He had sold a castle called Malemort to a man called Geoffroy de Ferron, treasurer to Jean V, Duke of Brittany. Gilles decided to repossess it by force; while Geoffrey was absent, the keys were held by his brother, a priest, and Gilles marched into his church, had him beaten, and thrown in a dungeon. It was the opportunity the Duke had been waiting for. For some time, he and the Bishop of Nantes had been wondering how they could cause Gilles’s downfall and seize his lands. Now, by attacking a member of the Church—and of the Duke’s household—he had left himself wide open. The Duke imposed a huge fine, which Gilles could not pay, and started an investigation into the disappearance of children.