The annals of injustices done to people accused of witchcraft are shockingly copious. There may be many stories more cruel and tragic than that of Alice Samuel, her husband James and their daughter Agnes, but theirs is not the expected one of a neighbourly feud escalating to torture and execution before a baying mob of villagers and a frothing witch-finder. What happened to the Samuel family and their accusers in 1589–1592 is, in many ways, surprisingly different from our expectations. Philip Almond shows it is far more complex.
We get glimpses of rural English life in the thrall of superstition and a fear of witchcraft at all levels of society. The Throckmorton family had just moved into the manor at Warboys in Huntingdonshire (now in Cambridgeshire) when one of their five daughters – Jane, aged 10 – began suffering fits. Their 76-year-old neighbour pops around to inquire after the girl. In her fit, Jane blames the old woman and, within a short time, Jane’s four sisters and some of their servants also fell to seizures.
Their convulsions were extraordinary, prolonged and deeply disturbing. Triggered at first by hearing pious phrases, which, in a Puritan family would have been frequent, they would arch backwards, their bellies swelling, and their limbs either trembling or held so rigidly that no adult could move them. There were puzzling feats of strength, memory and apparent clairvoyance. At first Robert Throckmorton and his wife refused to believe the worst. Despite the children’s apparent vendetta against Alice, Robert ordered her to stay with them permanently because the fits became less violent or even ceased in her presence.
The Throckmortons had a huge circle of family and friends, most of whom tried to coax a confession from old Mother Samuel. But it was the possessed children who kept up the pressure, hostile and vindictive one moment and blessing her for their relief the next, all the while sermonising her in the Puritan manner. While it became commonplace in the Throckmorton household to refer to the old lady as a witch, there is no sign of an ‘anti-witch’ panic (concern, yes) in the family nor in the wider community.
Then it got worse. The children’s ‘trances’ increased in frequency and severity. They said they were possessed by spirits – things described as like “dun chickens” – sent by Alice. These “familiars” would clamp mouths shut or inflict a selective blindness – the girls could see no adults, or perhaps one person but not others, or just clothes moving around while the wearer remained invisible.
Oddly, the girls seemed to welcome these tormentors, conversing with them by vocalising both parts (rather like Gollum in the Lord of the Rings movies). The demons would predict, through the girls, the nature and duration of coming fits and events (such as the arrival of strangers). Odder still, girls and demons colluded to free themselves from the Samuel family by having them condemned and hanged as witches. Alice – old, frightened and psychologically exhausted – eventually said what they wanted to hear. Released from her ‘bondage’, she recanted, but then the possessions resumed. She was forced to make another confession in church, recanted again, and was arraigned before the Bishop of Lincoln.
With Alice in gaol, it was the turn of Agnes to be accused by the children and kept hostage in the manor. The Samuels were the kind of people that pious Puritan gentry abhorred; they survived on the edge of ‘decent’ society. John Samuel beat his old wife. Agnes was uncooperative and resentful. By 1593, all three were facing serious charges at the Huntingdon assizes of enchantment, murder and possessing familiars. Nearly all the witnesses were from the Throckmorton clan.
The murder charge came in at the last minute. In 1590, the Throckmortons were visited by an old friend, Sir Henry Cromwell, and his wife Susan. Concerned about the children’s continuing ‘possession’, Lady Cromwell confronted Alice. When Alice denied complicity, Lady Cromwell cut some of the old lady’s hair and asked Mrs Throckmorton to burn it (a traditional counter to a witch’s power). Alice reacted angrily to this assault, saying: “Madam, why do you use me thus? I never did you any harm as yet.” That night, it was alleged, Lady Cromwell had nightmares and became ill and suffered until she died two years later, in 1592. As far as the court was concerned, the “as yet” remark ‘proved’ the old lady’s murderous intention. Alice, Agnes and John were tried on 5 April 1593, found guilty and hanged.
Professor Almond discusses the ambiguous nature of the possessions. If the family believed that Alice was tormenting the children with familiars, why did they have her stay with them for nearly two years? Were the girls ‘inventing’ the demons and ‘enacting’ their afflictions? At times, they seemed to control the demons, delivering sound theological sermons, and they’d react violently to holy words from others. The familiars resident in their bellies were happy to incriminate their ‘masters’, advising via their victims precisely how to cease the torments.
Another critical issue was Alice’s curious passivity. She had no grudge against the Throckmortons nor any motive for harming their children. In their presence she could be brow-beaten into confessing and away from their influence recant it; this happened many times. At the heart was a widespread belief that ‘spirits’ don’t lie. At one point, the girls point to some bleeding flea bites on Alice’s chin, saying a familiar feeds there. Alice denies it, but the girls insist they can see it and keep on asking why she can’t. In the end, she admits she has familiars and feeds them on her blood.
Similarly, the standard “performance” (as Almond calls it), played a key role in convicting all three Samuels. At first the sight of the girls in their fits was a private affair, but later they were shown to visitors and finally to the jury. The fits were pitiful to watch and a witness soon asks how they could be relieved, since praying made them worse. The only way, the spirits replied through their victims, is for Alice to say a ‘charm’. It usually took the form: “As I am a witch, so I charge the Devil to allow Mistress Jane to come out of her fit.” Time and again, Alice refuses to thus incriminate herself. Each time the girl’s suffering escalates until – for pity’s sake or simply to end her own and the girl’s torment – she finally says the words. Instantly the girl comes around, usually with no knowledge of what has happened, and surrounded by weeping and jubilant people.
Such scenes happened almost daily for the couple of years that the Throckmortons ‘insisted’ Alice stay with them. Only some time after the death of Lady Cromwell were the words “and did consent to the death of Lady Cromwell” added to the middle of the ‘charm’. To all witnesses – including, at the end, the court – the sudden efficacy of this exorcism was vividly apparent. It proved, in their minds, not just Alice’s guilt but the whole apparatus of witchcraft, possession and malice via familiars. Alice was, daily, faced with this ‘proof’ of her culpability and, inevitably, came to believe it. Agnes and John were likewise shown to be witches, for when they too were browbeaten into saying the exact words, the possessed girls would instantly, if temporarily, revive.
The sparse contemporary records have been painstakingly recovered by Professor Almond. He never loses sight of the protagonists as real people caught up in a social catastrophe. The result is a fascinating view into the roots of the collective phenomenon in which groups of young children have (usually unconsciously) colluded to accuse adults in their community of heinous crimes and abuse.
While the imagery used in such cases draws heavily on contemporary fantasies about the nature of evil, it does not lessen its power and danger. Many of the details of the Warboys case were employed by that self-proclaimed ‘Witchfinder General’ Matthew Hopkins during his reign of terror in Essex around 50 years later. One scholar has even claimed that the Warboys trial made such “a lasting impression on the class that made laws” that it precipitated the Witchcraft Act of 1604.
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