The True Story vs. Myth of Witchcraft. William Godwin
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rather to sit by spectators of these horrors, than to expose themselves to the fate of Edelin or Flaet, by attacking the madness in which they originated. But now, when the pestilence, spreading on and on, threatened the lives of more exalted victims,—when noblemen and abbots, presidents of courts and professors, began to swell the catalogue, and when no man felt secure that he might not suddenly be compelled by torture to bear witness against his own innocent wife or children,—selfishness began to co-operate with truth and reason. So, in the same way, in the case of the New England witchcrafts, the first effectual check which they received was from the accusation of Mrs. Hale, the clergyman’s wife: her husband, who till then had been most active in the persecution, immediately received a new light with regard to the transaction, and exerted his whole influence for the suppression of the trials.
The first decisive blow which the doctrines of the inquisitors received in Germany was from the publication of the ‘Cautio Criminalis,’ in 1631. In the sixteenth century, it is true that Ponzonibius, Wierus, Pietro d’Apone, and Reginald Scott had published works which went to impugn their whole proceedings; but the works of the foreigners were almost unknown in Germany, and that of Wierus was nearly as absurd and superstitious as the doctrines he combated. It is little to the credit of the Reformers that the first work in which the matter was treated in a philosophical, humane, and common-sense view should have been the production of a Catholic Jesuit, Frederick Spee, the descendant of a noble family in Westphalia. So strongly did this exposure of the horrors of the witch trials operate on the mind of John Philip Schonbrunn, Bishop of Wurtzburg, and finally Archbishop and Elector of Mentz, that his first care on assuming the Electoral dignity was to abolish the process entirely within his dominions—an example which was soon after followed by the Duke of Brunswick and others of the German princes. Shortly after this the darkness begins to break up, and the dawning of better views to appear, though still liable to partial and temporary obscurations,—the evil apparently shifting further north, and re-appearing in Sweden and Denmark in the shape of the trials at Mora and Fioge. Reichard33 has published a rescript of Frederick William, Elector of Brandenburg, bearing date the 4th of November, 1654, addressed to the judges in reference to the case of Ann of Ellerbroke, enjoining that the prisoner should be allowed to be heard in defence, before any torture was resorted to (a principle directly the reverse of those maintained by the inquisitorial courts), and expressly reprobating the proof by water as an unjust and deceitful test, to which no credit was to be given. Even where a conviction takes place, as in the Neuendorf trial of Catherine Sempels, we find the sentence of death first passed upon her by the provincial judges, commuted into imprisonment for life by the Electoral Chamber in 1671,—a degree of lenity which never could have taken place during the height of the mania.
In 1701 the celebrated inaugural Thesis of Thomasius, ‘De Crimine Magiæ,’ was publicly delivered, with the highest applause, in the University of Halle, a work which some fifty years before would assuredly have procured the author no other crown but that of martyrdom, but which was now received with general approbation, as embodying the views which the honest and intelligent had long entertained. Thomasius’s great storehouse of information and argument was the work of Bekker, who again had modelled his on the Treatise of Van Dale on Oracles; and Thomasius, while he adopted his facts and arguments, steered clear of those Cartesian doctrines which had been the chief cause why the work of Bekker had produced so little practical effect. Still, notwithstanding the good thus produced, the fire of persecution seems to have been smothered only, not extinguished. In 1728 it flamed up again at Szegedin in Hungary, where thirteen persons were burnt alive on three scaffolds, for witchcraft, under circumstances of horror worthy of the wildest periods of this madness. And so late as 1749 comes the frightful story of Maria Renata, of Wurtzburg, the whole official details of which are published by Horst, and which in its atrocity was worthy to conclude the long series of murders which had polluted the annals of Bamberg. This trial is remarkable from the feeling of disgust it seems to have excited in Germany, Italy, and France; and the more so because, whatever may be thought of the reality of her pretensions, there seems to be no doubt from the evidence that Maria was by no means immaculate, but was a dabbler in spells and potions, a venefica in the sense of the Theodosian code. But there is a time, as Solomon says, for everything under the sun; and the glories of the ‘Malleus Maleficarum’ were departed. The consequence was, that taking this trial as their text-book, various foreigners, particularly Maffei, Tartarotti, and Dell’ Ossa, attacked the system so vigorously, that since that time the adherents of the old superstition seem to have abandoned the field in Germany.
Matters had come to a close much sooner in Switzerland and France. In the Catholic canton of Glarus, it is said, a witch was burnt even so late as 1786; but in the Protestant cantons no trials seem to have taken place for two centuries past. The last execution in Geneva was that of Michel Chauderon, in 1652. Sebastian Michaelis indeed would have us to believe, that at one time the tribunal at Geneva put no criminals accused of witchcraft to death, unless on proof of their having done actual injury to men or animals, and that the other phenomena of confessions, etc., were regarded as mere mental delusions. If such however was originally the case, this humane rule was unfortunately soon abandoned; for nowhere did the mania of persecution at one time rage more than in Geneva, as is evident from Delrio’s preface. It seems fairly entitled however to the credit of having been the first state in Europe which emancipated itself from the influence of this bloody superstition.
In France, the edict of Louis XIV., in 1682, directed only against pretended witches and prophets, proves distinctly that the belief in the reality of witchcraft had ceased, and that it was merely the pretended exercise of such powers which it was thought necessary to suppress. It is highly to the credit of Louis and his ministry, that this step was taken by him in opposition to a formal requête by the Parliament of Normandy, presented in the year 1670, on the occasion of his Majesty having commuted the punishment of death into banishment for life, in the case of a set of criminals whom the Parliament had condemned more majorum for witchcraft34. In this apology for their belief, they reminded Louis of the inveterate practice of the kingdom; of the numerous arrêts of the Parliament of Paris, from the trials in Artois in 1459, reported by Monstrelet, down to that of Leger in May 1616; of the judgments pronounced under the commission addressed by Henry the Great to the Sieur de l’Ancre, in 1609; of those pronounced by the Parliament of Toulouse, in 1577; of the celebrated case of Gaufridy, in 1611; of the arrêts of the Parliaments of Dijon and Rennes, following on the remarkable trial of the Maréchal de Retz, in 1441, who was burnt for magic and sorcery in the presence of the Duke of Bretagne: and after combating the authority of a canon of the Council of Aucyra, and of a passage in St. Augustine, which had been quoted against them by their opponents, they sum up their pleading with the following placid and charitable supplication to his Majesty—“Qu’elle voudra bien souffrir l’exécution des arrêts qu’ils ont rendus, et leur permettre de continuer l’instruction et jugement des procès des personnes accusés de sortilège, et que la piété de Votre Majesté ne souffrira pas que l’on introduise durant son règne une nouvelle opinion contraire aux principes de la religion, pour laquelle Votre Majesté a toujours si glorieusement employé ses soins et ses armes.” Notwithstanding this concluding compliment to his Majesty’s zeal and piety, it is doubtful whether the Parliament of Normandy, in their anxiety for the support of their constitutional privileges, could have taken a more effectual plan to ruin their own case, than by thus presenting Louis with a sort of anthology or elegant extracts from the atrocities of the witch trials; and in all probability the appearance of the edict of 1680 was accelerated by the very remonstrance by which the Norman sages had hoped to strangle it.
In turning from the Continent to the state of matters in England and Scotland, the prospect is anything but a comfortable one; and certainly nothing can be more deceitful than the unction which Dr. Francis Hutchinson lays to his soul, when he ventures to assert that England was one of those countries where its horrors were least felt and earliest suppressed. Witness the trials and convictions which, even before the enactment of any penal statute, took place for this imaginary offence, as in the case of Bolingbroke and Margery Jourdain, whose incantations the genius of Shakespear has rendered familiar to us in the Second Part of King Henry VI. Witness the successive