SUPERSTITION IN NEW ENGLAND

New Zealand Tablet, 2 July 1914, Page 17

SUPERSTITION IN NEW ENGLAND

BIGOTRY AND INTOLERANCE OF THE PURITANS.

In Irish Witchcraft and Demonology , the author, St. John D. Seymour, 8.D., who is not a Catholic, finds that up to the Anglo-Norman invasion the story of witchcraft in Ireland can be written with the same brevity as the celebrated chapter on its snakes (writes the Rev. M. Kenny, S.J., in America). The AngloNormans brought it over, but failed to popularise it, for, previous to the Reformation, they alone wore the dramatis personae in witch trials, which were so few and insignificant that in 1417 the Irish Parliament protested to the King that ‘ no such art [sorcery or necromancy] was attempted at any time in this land, known or rumored among the people.’ The reformers broke the record. Bringing with them the witchcraft superstitions that then ran riot in Scotland and England, they put them on the Irish statute-book; but though the practice continued, especially among the Cromwellians and Scotch planters, and some of their superstitious, such as milk charming, were adopted by an occasional native.

The General Antipathy of the Catholic Majority to persecutions, whether of witches or heretics, prevented the transplantation from flourishing. The trials and condemnations occurred among Protestants only, so that to find a real case of a genuine Irish witch of native stock, the author has had to come to America. The inaccuracy of his account of this alleged IrishAmerican witch, due to his following exclusively Cotton Mather's narration, and the remarkable accompaniments and consequences of her execution, arc the occasion .of this paper.

The woman was Ann Glover, executed in Boston in 1688, ostensibly as a witch, really as a Catholic. The original settlers brought with them the mania against Catholics, Jesuits, and witches then prevalent in England, and all three were banned and barred in Boston’s ‘ Body of Liberties,’ drawn up in 1636 by the ‘ Simple Cobbler of Agawam. Their practice was sometimes better than their principles, for in 1650 “the dignitaries showed much courtesy to Father Druilhettes, S.J., notably John Eliot, of Indian missionary fame, who, he writes, ‘ treated me with great kindness and begged me to spend the winter with him. But Druilhettes was an ambassador from the Quebec Government on a matter of business interest, and the same year it was decreed that any Jesuit remaining in the colony should be executed. Witches began to get like attention when Endicott became Governor. It was not, however, till the Mather family dominated Boston that persecution flourished. There had been three executions for witchcraft from 1648 to 1656, and* four of Quakers, one of them a woman, from 1569 to 1661 ; but it was from 1688 to 1693, while the Mathers ruled supreme,

That Witchcraft Became General.

Robert Calcf, a Boston merchant, writes in More Wonders of the Invisible World, printed in London in 1700 ; ‘ In the time of Sir Edmund Andros’ government, Goody Glover, a despised, crazy, ill-conditioned old woman, an Irish Roman Catholic, was tried for afflicting Goodwin’s children.’ He adds that ‘Cotton Mather was the most active and forward of any minister, taking home one of the children, and managing such an. intrigue with that child and printing such an account of the whole in his Memorable. Providences as condoned much to tho kindling of those flames ’ T —that culminated in the Salem executions and imprisonments of 1692-3. Calcf was one of the men of Boston who, with Leverett and the two Breattles, vigorously opposed the witch-hunting of the Mathers at the risk of their lives, and eventually suppressed it. The English opinion at that time that a witch, a devil, and a Catholic were one and the same, was sedulously fostered.

There are extant many Protestant confirmations of Ralph Hovem’s dictum that though ‘ all Papists be not witches, commonly all witches be spawn of the Pope 7 ; and when Cotton Mather discovered a Catholic in Boston, he found her a most suitable victim, her religion alone establishing her guilt. Ann Glover, as he names her, was an Irishwoman who had been sold into slavery under Cromwell, with her husband and many- thousands of Irish folk, and sent to the Barbadocs. She testified that shortly .after her daughter’s birth, her husband had been scared to death and did not give up his religion, which the same I will hold to. Whether this happened before or after her arrival in Boston is not dear, but that she. and her daughter suffered death, because they would not give up their religion, is clear enough. A late issue of the Catholic Historical Researches of Philadelphia, shows that there were many Irish Catholics in the Barbadoes and Bahamas at this period, and wo know that a large train of slaves was brought thence to New England, some of whom fell to Preacher Parris, of Salem. Ann Glover was known as a. Catholic in 1682, and thereby gave umbrage to ‘ the only Christian people. A woman who had failed to convince her of ‘ Papistical errors ’ accused her of witchcraft, and, dying soon after, pronhesied that she would bo hanged. Mather undertook The Fulfilment of the Prophecy. The story may be gleaned from his writings and from those of Calcf and Drake. Ann Glover made a scant living by washing for those who would employ a Papist. One of these was John Goodwin, whose family wore special proteges of Mather. Ills daughter Martha falsely accused Ann Glover’s daughter of purloining some clothes, and when this was disproved charged both with bewitching her. Even if Mather had not inspired the precocious Martha, the accusation was perfectly natural. Witchery and diabolic possession, and the devil and his ways and environment, formed the usual subject of Mather’s sermons, as one may glean from his Memorable Providences and Mat/nalia and most of his more than two hundred curious productions. He took the Goodwin child to his home, and Calef accuses him of tutoring her in suitable evidence of Glover’s witcheries, while according to Brooks Adams, in Emancipation of as sack 1/setts, Goodwin’s four children began to mimic the symptoms they heard so often described. One thing is certain: Ann Glover was not ‘crazy in the modern meaning—the term was then used in the sense of weak: and infirm, as Drake points out in his Annals of Witchcraft in New England —and

It was Because of Her Religion

and not for witchcraft that ‘they did her cruel,’ as Calef graphically expresses it. Mather describes her as ‘ a scandalous old Irishwoman, very poor and obstinate in idolatry.’ Her bewitchment empowered the Goodwin girl, he says, while ‘ possessed of the devil and Glover, to read Popish books and even Quaker and Episcopal volumes, ‘ but not books against Popery.’ Mather had been long trying to convert mother and daughter from' ‘ obstinate Popery, and their answer to the Goodwin charge in 1687 is significant: ‘You may have us whipped, but we won’t go to the sermons. It was then, says Drake, ‘ that the magistrates, long annoyed by the presence of an obstinate Papist in Boston, ordered Goody Glover to be taken into custody.’ Already her daughter, who ‘ would not go to the sermons 7 had been driven to lunacy and death by ‘ stonings and revilings. 7 The mother’s trial elicited no guilt except that she was a Catholic and spoke Gaelic, ‘ instigated by the devil.’ When they showed her ‘an idol secret in her house 7 —seemingly a small statue — she snatched at it with "joy, and cried;

‘ I Die a Catholic.

Thereupon the ‘jury brought her guilty.’ The magistrates visited her in . prison, urging her to retract. When they asked her what would become of her soul, she said: ‘I trust in God.’ Mather asked'her to say the Lord’s Prayer, which a Catholic or witch was

deemed unable to do. ' ‘ She recited the Pater Nosteito me,’ he writes, ‘ in Latin and in Irish and in English, but she could not end it ’ —that is, in he Protestant way. She said ‘deliver us from evil’ in a voice marvellous strong,’ which Mather interpreted as a reproach to the devil for deserting her, -but was evidently intended for himself. As she continued * obstinate,’ the next day was appointed for her hanging, ‘ and there was a great concourse of people to see if the Papist would relent. . . Before her execution, adds Mather, 1 she was bold and impudent, making to forgive her accusers and those who put her off. One can understand the Scribes and Pharisees preferring.* a like charge against our Saviour on the Cross as He uttered the same prayer. The following year it was written that there was no longer a Catholic in New England. Three years later, Rebecca Nurse, a lady who had befriended Ann Glover, was hanged at Salem, and though better conditions followed the downfall of the Mathers, after the executions and imprisonments of 1692-3, in 1724 the white scalp of Father Sebastian Rale, S.J., was put up at auction in Boston,

But Ann Glover’s Prayer was Heard.

Rfile’s relics were inherited by a Catholic priest, the direct descendant of the commander of the troop that murdered him, and among those who decreed or witnessed the execution of Ann Glover in 1688, there is scarce a family that has not given some or all of its members to the Catholic Church and they and their brethren are now exercising, with justice and tolerance, more authority in Massachusetts than was ever possessed by the Mathers. A Catholic Governor sits in the chair of Endicott : a Cardinal-Archbishop rules from Boston one of the most flourishing and faithful dioceses of the Catholic Church. The Catholics of New England should keep in gracious memory that humble, noblehearted woman, who in slavery and poverty, and bitter exile and isolation, and persecution and prison and death, was staunch against all persuasions, and died a Catholic, forgiving and praying for her enemies.