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"In the fall of the year 1688,
13-year-old Martha Goodwin, daughter of John Goodwin, a mason, who was
described as "a grave man and good liver," sorted the household linen in her
home in the north end of the town, and discovered that several pieces were
missing.
The girl promptly
decided that the linen had been stolen by the woman who did the family
washing, the daughter of an old widowed Irish woman who lived nearby. Martha
visited the widow, whose name was Glover, and asserted that her daughter
was a thief.
It is not surprising, in the
circumstances, that the mother came to the defense of her child. In fluent
Gaelic and [broken] English she gave the young accuser a tongue lashing and
sent her home. Thus began a feud which ended when Goodwife Glover was hung
upon the gallows on Boston Neck for what Reverend Cotton Mather called a "very
stupendous witchcraft."
Looking back upon it, the
"stupendous" witchcraft seems little more than the tragic devility of
prayer-bored, psalm-bored children, seeking revenge and excitement at the
same time. Children appear in many witchcraft cases. In the ghastly Salem
witchcraft delusion, which was to come in another four years, they were the
chief instigators. In fact, it is the consistent participation of children
that gives us almost the only glimmering of understanding of this amazing
business.
About three years before the affair
of the missing laundry, there had been received in Boston printed accounts of
recent witchcraft cases in England. The accounts told how the bewitched
children had acted,—told in
such detail that when the Goodwin children and the children at Salem became
afflicted they behaved exactly as had the children in England. And when we
stop to consider how children are given to imitation, a part, at least, of
the witchcraft mystery seems a mystery no longer.
When Martha Goodwin returned home
from her interview with Goodwife Glover she was—we
use the account of Reverend John Cotton, a participant—"Immediately
taken with odd fits, that carried in them something diabolical. It was not
long before one of her sisters [Mercy, age 8], with two of her brothers
[Nathaniel, 15, and John, 11] were horribly taken with the like Fits, which
the most extraordinary and preternatural.... At 9 or 10 o'clock at night,
they still had a release from their miseries, and slept all night pretty
comfortably."—which is no
wonder, for they must have been tired after playing their witchcraft game
through the day.
But when the day came, continued
Mather, "they were most miserably handled. Sometimes they were deaf,
sometimes dumb, sometimes blind, and often all this at once. Their
tongues would be drawn down their throats, and then pulled out upon their
chins, to a prodigious length. Their mouths were forced open to such a
wideness, that their jaws went out of joint; and [then] clap together again,
with a force like that of a spring lock; and the like would happen to their
shoulder blades and their elbows, and hand-wrists, and several of their
joints. They would lie in a benummed condition, and be drawn together like
those that are tied neck and heels, and presently be stretched out, yea,
drawn back enormously.
The old Irish woman and her daughter
were thrown into prison in late September or very early October. The mother
appears to have been the only one brought to trial.
When the unfortunate woman—old,
infirm, bewildered by the proceedings, unable to clearly express herself in
English—made answer in Irish
to the questions of her accusers, it was regarded as a very suspicious
circumstance.
"And the interpreters," says Mather,
"were made sensible that a Spell had been laid by another Witch on This to
prevent her telling tales, by confining her to a language which 'twas hoped,
no body would understand." In other words, it was decided that the witch was
herself bewitched.
"The woman's house being searched,
several images, or puppets, or babies, made of rags, and stuffed with goat's
hair [rag dolls or possibly crude statues of saints] were thence produced
and the vile woman confessed, that her way to torment the objects of her
malice was by wetting her finger with her spittle, and stroking of those
little images. The abused children were then present in the Court, and the
woman kept still stooping and shrinking, as one that was almost pressed unto
death with a mighty weight upon her. But one of the images being brought
upon her, she oddly and swiftly started up and snatched it into her hand:
But she had no sooner snatched it, than one of the children fell into sad
fits before the whole Assembly....
"The court appointed five or six
physicians to examine her very strictly, whether she were no way crazed in
her intellectuals. Diverse hours did they spend with her; and in all that
while no discourse came from her but what was agreeable; particularly when
they asked her, what she thought would become of her Soul, she replied,
"You ask me a very solemn question, and I cannot tell what to say to it."
"She professed herself a Roman
Catholic, and could recite her Paternoster in Latin very readily; but there
was one clause or two always too hard for her, whereof she said, she could
not repeat it, "if she might have all the World."
These reports of the physicians were
telling evidence. If the old lady did not know what was to become of her Soul, she
plainly meant that her Soul belonged to the devil. And when, in
mumbling her "Our Father," she stumbled over certain Latin phrases, it was
clear enough that some unseen power was preventing her.
The doctors pronounced her sane and
she was found guilty and condemned to death.
Mather says that he visited her and
that she confessed to him "that her prince was the devil." He suggested
praying for her and she refused—"her
spirits would not give her leave."
On Friday, November 26, about 11 in
the morning, the convicted witch was carried to the gallows in a cart and
hanged. Goodwife Glover's death brought no relief to the bewitched. Their
game, it appears, was proving amusing to them. So "the three children
continued in their furnace, as before."
One of the boys claimed to see
specters; and when a blow was struck at the spot where the specter lay, the
child set up a loud bellowing, claiming he had been hurt.
"The calamities of the children went
on till they barked at one another like dogs, and then purred like so many
cats. They would complain that they were in a red-hot oven, and sweat and
pant as much as if they had been really so. [And next] they would say that
cold water was thrown on them, at which they would shiver very much."
The older girl, Martha, was taken
into Mather's home. There she cried out at times that she was being
bound with chains. Again, she would caper about as if riding horseback,
"sometimes ambling, sometimes trotting, sometimes galloping very
furiously...and unto admiration she rode (that is, was tossed as one that
rode) up the stairs."
But after a time the novelty
wore off. Martha tired of being the heroine of the piece, the evil spirits
departed, and the tragedy came to an end.
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