'To heaven on a gibbet': the repentance of Nathaniel Butler, murderer, 1657

Because of Frank Thorney in The Witch of Edmonton, I have been thinking about exemplary penitence in early modern culture, and the way the felon who, accepting their punishment as just, and making all the right noises about contrition, is rehabilitated by a communal forgiveness (where ‘forgiveness’ means not remission of punishment, but assurances from the spiritual leaders of the community that they can die with some certainty of not being damned).

The case I’ve found as a historical parallel is that of Nathaniel Butler, who in 1657 perpetrated a brutal murder, attacking his sleeping bedfellow, a nineteen year old apprentice named John Knight. The motive was nothing to do with sex, or shame: nobody in any of the pamphlets about the case finds anything unusual about two young men sharing a bed. Rather, John Knight had been left in charge of his master’s business, a silk mercery, and Butler had seen just how much money was in the till. Knight had invited Butler to stay with him because he didn’t want to be alone with the responsibility of holding the keys to the till.

Only Knight knew that Butler was in the premises: Butler been leaving his own master’s house on the quiet, and had come and gone late and early to spend the nights with Knight. Again, this surreptitious aspect to his behaviour sprang, as far as you can tell, from not being under his own master’s roof at night.

It should also be said that Butler may have had a reputation as a bad sort, exactly the wrong sort of companion for a trusted apprentice. He had twice been moved on (‘turned over’ is the expression used), master to master. For a young male inhabitant of Oliver Cromwell’s London, Butler was managing to live a surprisingly rakish life, drinking and visiting brothels: “He lived in Fornication, frequenting the company and the Houses of Harlots”, asserted Samuel Ward in a later work, A Warning-piece to all drunkards and health-drinkers. He financed this way of carrying on by befriending other apprentices (who, in their trammelled lives, might have found a wicked friend intensely stimulating). Soon his friends or victims would be robbing the shop to fund their interesting new life with young Nathaniel.

I do recognise that part of the way Butler could tell his story was as a journey from what John Ford had Frank Thorney call the 'abyss' back to salvation, Butler might well have played up his vices as part of that narrative, as when he "condemned himself in his general ill led life, as having been addicted to gaming, drinking, and abusing himself with women, and other vices whereto the Devil had inured him, in order to this his black or rather bloody sin of Murder. He hath been often heard to cry out of his too licentious course of life, And as oft hath he cried out of the sight of the money, which led him into the snare of temptation to this vile Act." (A Full and the truest narrative of the most horrid, barbarous and unparalled murder, p.9. A word or two may have dropped from the text, the devil inuring him to vice in order to lead to his black or rather bloody sin of murder.)

The murder was most foul. Butler had seen two bags of full of money (there was £110) in the till on Tuesday, and had been brooding about getting his hands on it. During the daylight hours of Wednesday, August 5th, Knight and he had a ‘morning draught’ together at The Black Swan, and agreed to spend the afternoon fishing. Knight bought Butler a rod. They went fishing, having bought bread bait at a tavern called The Sun, from 2pm till 5pm. Then, “We appointed to meet together at eight of the clock that night, which we did at Honey-lane end, and thence went into Fish-street to the Maiden-head, and drunk three half pints of Sack, and eat a piece of Salmon of twelve pence.”

After briefly going back to his own lodgings, Butler was hiding in the warehouse when the silk merchant’s premises were locked up at 10pm. In Knight’s bed, Butler could not sleep: “I made proffer many a time with my knife to the intent to cut John's throat, and once put my knife up again: And between three and four of the clock, on Thursday morning, I took my knife and cut his Mouth to his Ear, at which he shrieked out and cried Murder. Then I put my right hand into his Mouth, and so lay struggling together for about half an hour, and at length I strangled him: after which I looked about the Chamber, and the Devil instigated me to cut his Throat, which I did with my right hand, we being both naked.

Then I slipped off my bloody Shirt, and wiped the blood off me, and put on my clothes, and having taken the Keys of the Till, where the money lay, out of John's pocket: I brought down my bloody shirt, and laid it on the Counter in the shop, and opened the Till and took out two Bags of money, and went away with them, leaving the Keys in the Till, and the shop door open standing a char.”

The murderous assault did not leave Butler unscathed: when the normal business of Thursday morning started: “A sad spectacle is discovered by a bloody shirt found (lying on the Counter in the Shop in the morning,) by the maid servant of the house, who presently called in some of the neighbours, who going to the chamber where the Apprentice lay, they found him lying with his feet on a corner of the bolster, and his head towards the lower end of the bed, in gore blood, and with a lock of hair in his right hand, and some scattering hairs were found in his left-hand also; they were all struck with amazement! The house is raised! The neighbourhood called in! A tumult about the door! The murder visible! The Murderer unknown and escaped in the morning, presently after the fact.”(A Full and the truest narrative, p.3.)

The various approved narratives of the killing stress that Butler was then incapacitated by guilt, conscience-stricken by what he has done. He did, despite this assertion, buy himself a new trunk, and had locked the two bags of money in it, but he stayed under his master’s roof. Back at Mr Worth’s shop, everybody in the neighbourhood queued up the stairs to view the victim’s body. A young man volunteered that he saw Knight fishing with another youth, not known to him, the day before. Asked to describe this person’s clothing, the witness unluckily described clothes exactly as worn by a young man who happened to be peeping round the door, who was seized and questioned.

Then a neighbour’s servant named Butler as an acquaintance of Knight, not as a suspect, but as someone who might know more about other acquaintances of the dead apprentice. Those sent to find Butler found him in a shop in Bread Street, and “asking him whether he knew one John Knight, he being as it seems smitten in his own heart, faltered in his speech, & made out of the shop with a dejected Countenance; at first denying that he knew him, but presently after confessed that he did know him; whereupon they asked him to accompany them to Milk-street? but he pretended businesse and said he could not go then, and went his way: In this discourse with him, having perceived his hands to be scratched, they began to be suspicious of him, so that they followed him at a distance, till they saw him in his Masters house in Carter lane.”

When this was reported back, one of the marshal’s men was sent to detain Butler at his master’s house in Carter Lane. He was brought to the scene of his crime without him making any resistance “where he was caused to be stripped, and in searching him, his Leather Drawers were found to be bloody, and some blood about his Clothes; also stains of blood on his Stockings, which with the scratches on his Face and Hands, were strong presumptions, that he had a hand in this Murder, with which he being charged, several times denied. During the time of this search of him, the Marshal of this City with another Gentleman went down to his Masters house, and enquiring for Butler's Trunk, a new Trunk was shewed them, which being instantly broke open, they therein found two Bags of money, one of which Bags had Mr. Worth’s Mark on it, which being brought by the Marshal to Mr. Worth’s house, and being thrown down upon a Table with acclamation! that they had not only found out the Murderer, but the money also: The Marshal’s man then called for a Cord, wherewith he bound his Hands; Some of his Hair being plucked off to be compared with the Hair which was found in the young man’s hand that was Murdered; and being ready to carry him away: He then began in a crying manner to Confess; the Coroner and some of the Jury with two Constables being present, he began by degrees to acknowledge one thing after another; and at last confessed the whole Murder, and the manner thereof before them.”

So much for the murder: Butler’s trial was a formality, his death sentence inevitable.
This is the entry in the newsletter, Mercurius Politicus for the week of August 13th-20th:

As you see, two men and three women received death sentences in the same week, with 14 branded and 7 set to be whipped. Why Butler jumped to prominence among this company of felons and unfortunates stems from (obviously) the awfulness of his crime, a discovery of his guilt that was seen as under providential direction, and, most importantly, the elaborate thoroughness of his repentance.

At his trial, Butler confessed everything: his only plea to the court was that he be given more time to repent. It was objected by the Lord Mayor himself that he had given poor Knight no chance to die having purged his soul of sins. Nevertheless, Butler’s plea was upheld. One by one, divine by divine, then in numbers, clerics and chaplains came to his cell in Newgate. This mobilisation apparently stemmed from moral alarm at the bloodiness of this crime in Oliver Cromwell’s God-fearing London. In 1657, they were near enough in time to earlier habits of discourse to be shocked by a crime against friendship, but there’s also a real sense that they felt a money-motivated murder just ought not to be happening. Butler had revealed to them a worrying vision of apparently integrated and virtuous young men, London apprentices stealing from their masters to finance a range of urban debaucheries that ought not to be there. Butler represents a malaise: so he had to be turned into a figure of reclaimed godliness. One of the pamphlets says that "he hath declared some of his Complices, and what an ill instrument he had been for them, with their wicked practices in wronging of their Masters, and many other things tending to their Masters wrong, and their own ruins; which in time will be further enquired into." But that sounds like a vague assurance, half-expressive of a reluctance to find more trouble than is necessary. The main aim was getting Butler's life told to proper and instructive effect.

The Puritans set to work on him. Randolph Yearwood, the Lord Mayor’s chaplain, recounts how Butler needed to move beyond simply acknowledging his sins, to a full understanding of his sinful nature:

“At my first Conference with him which was about five or six days after his Condemnation, I found him very ready to acknowledge his actual sins, and to charge himself with them and the aggravations that did accompany them, and this with sad tears of complaint, and indignation against himself and his sins; but did take no notice of his sinful Nature; Which myself and a Friend with me (Mr Griffith of the Charter house) perceiving, We endeavoured by Scripture to shew him his sinful Nature, as the Root of all his sinful actions.”

This seems curious, or unexpected. 'Actual sin' is a technical theological term, and in the OED ("after post-classical Latin peccatum actuale ...Theol. sin committed through a person's own actions; opposed to original sin"). But it makes me see that Frank Thorney in the play, who talks so thoroughly about his accumulated sin from his earliest years, while barely saying anything in the way of pertinent regret and contrition for the dreadful killing he perpetrated, is conforming to the same type of idea: your larger and innate sinfulness is as important a priority as the specific sin in your specific crime, or maybe even more important. Once you acknowledge your 'sinful nature', then you can realise your utter dependence on divine grace, and so proceed towards salvation.

The Lord Mayor of London, Sir Robert Titchbourne, himself visited Butler’s cell four days after the murder, to instruct him.  The Lord Mayor contributed to one of the pamphlets describing the case and its outcome: part of Yearwood's The Penitent Murderer is "under his Lordships own hand."

This mobilisation, born of a desire to control ad manage this piece of news, explains is why there is such an emphasis within the surviving pamphlets on how London readers must not pay attention to sensational, lying, slanderous pamphlets and ballads that have been published. (A Full and the truest narrative of the most horrid, barbarous and unparalled murder, committed on the person of John Knight was “Published after many Lying and false Relations both before and since his Death, with a detection of many lies and absurdities; and that the truth may be known.”) The story has to be a victory for faith, a re-assertion of civic order, not a fictionalised and sensationalised tale of gore. Of the pamphlets vilified by the various chaplains and Puritan divines dealing with the good outcome of this murder, I can only find Heavens cry against murder. Or, a true relation of the the bloudy & unparallel'd murder of John Knight. This would seem to be a plausible account of events, but was vehemently accused of various inaccuracies, such as impugning the probity of Butler’s father, asserting that the two young men had been baptised in the same font, and even alleging that Butler paid his master Mr Goodday half a crown a day to employ a journeyman to work in his place so that “he might have the more freedom of excess and riot”, adding “('Tis the more pity and misery, that such base gifts should blind a Master’s eyes and judgement too)”. I think this pamphleteer went too far in spreading blame to the senior adult generation. The convincing details in the pamphlet are probably novelistic in nature (the writer imagines that Butler turned up at Knight's funeral, and gave himself away). The author certainly spins out his sketchy knowledge of the events with not very illuminating moralisations about the evil of murder, which fill most of the little book.

Meanwhile, in the newsletter, Mercurius Politicus, a series of adverts announced the forthcoming approved version:

In his last fortnight, Butler became more and more the exemplary instance of the sinner reclaimed. His various counsellors express extraordinary confidence about his chance of salvation. Randolph Yearwood told the Lord Mayor, his patron, that “I verily believe you will see him yet once more; not as a Malefactor in an obscure disparaging Goal, but as an Angel of God in the Kingdom of Christ, whither (I am confident) he is gone, and you are going.” J.D. began his Blood washed away by tears of repentence with a letter to Butler, which he then took to the prison, paid his fee to enter, and delivered to the malefactor

In this febrile atmosphere, heady with repentance and a sense of the sinner reclaimed, the young man himself appears hysterically joyful, eager for the scaffold. This is the account of his last night, from Yearwood's The penitent murderer - "Evangelical joy" was an expression of approval used from 1617 onwards.

"About five a clock he fell into such a rapture and extasie of consolation as I never saw, nor (I believe) any of my fellow-Spectators; for he would shout for joy that the Lord should look on such a poor vile creature as he was: He often cried out, and made a noise, and indeed did not know how to express, and signifie fully enough his inward sense of Gods favour, saying, Must he be an heir, an heir of God, and a joint-heir with Jesus Christ, a fellow Citizen with the Saints, &c.He could not bear such a glorious discovery. Now that his joy was right Evangelical joy, appeareth thus, in that mourning and bitterness went before it; yea, he rejoiced with trembling, and could exceedingly often say that he would yet have a deeper, and a more thorough sense of sin; he could never be sufficiently abased before the Lord.Now the time was at hand that he should be carried forth to Execution, but he thought it was not near enough; for he asked several times, What a clock is it? I demanded why he enquired so concerning the time of the day? Would you gladly die? said I. Yes, yes, saith he, I desire to be dissolved, and to be with Christ which is best of all." 

One can note that the forgiveness is determined and led by the Puritan divines, in charge of community response. In the present day, perpetrators of awful crimes are expected to exhibit remorse, and the reactions to that remorse by friends or family of the victim is faithfully reported. Among all these pamphlets, I have not seen any indication of what poor Knight’s family thought about the murderer. Their opinion was not sought, not important.

In that bible-addled age, it only needed a platform for almost any person to set up as amateur preacher: the scaffold was one, the demonically possessed also tend to embark on emulations of the sermonising to which they had always been exposed. Butler did his best, trying to address the vast crowd that gathered to see him hanged from papers, and going on in sweaty terror and exultation for over an hour, before being asked to abbreviate and cease reading out from his papers what was anyway inaudible to most. Butler found further favour by officiously denouncing ‘papists’ who had visited him in prison, which he alleges they did to put the argument to him that only the true Catholic church could absolve his crime. Butler further asserted that among such visitors were ‘papist’ ladies. Anyone who paid the fee to the gaoler was admitted, and the thought of such a propaganda coup, executed right under Cromwell’s nose, as Butler’s late conversion and embrace of Rome may indeed have induced such an attempt, whatever its risks.

This is the first report of the murder I have discussed, from the newsletter (Mercurius Politicus) of the same week:

That is the bare report, unadorned, un-spun. There's little about it to suggest what an outpouring would follow:

One of the famous books of the age was John Reynolds' big anthology of stories in The triumphs of Gods revenge against the crying and execrable sin of murther. There had been an edition in 1656, but a new one appeared in 1657. The title page seems to have been augmented from a relatively plain 

to one that didn't simply point to murders abroad, but acknowledged trouble at home: "histories which contain great variety of mournful and memorable accidents, historical, moral, and divine, very necessary to restrain and deter us from the bloody sin, which in these our days makes so ample, and large a progression". That would, I think, be Butler.

The quarto of The Witch of Edmonton was printed in 1658. I've often wondered why then, in that particular year, and very tentatively wonder now whether Frank Thorney didn't come into somebody's memory, triggering the thought that there had been a play with a very penitent murderer in it (and that type of person sold well).

The evil eye in early modern England

I had always rather casually assumed that Elizabeth Sawyer, in The Witch of Edmonton, could have been seen as a particularly striking example of a witch possessed of an evil eye - through having just the one. The play mentions that she's one-eyed, though rather in passing ("let her curse her t'other eye out"), and it's not necessarily the case that the actor went through with being consistent with this when preparing to go on stage and actually played her while wearing an eye patch.

The play does, on the other hand, seem conscious about eyes, and offers its own version of cruentation when the corpse of the murdered Susan Carter opens an eye to glare accusingly at Frank Thorney. So, in that moment of occult resemblance between the good and bad woman of the play, we understand that a spirit is doing this to Susan's body to bring Frank to justice.

But does the text show any awareness of the evil eye? According to the OED, it should not be thought to do so:

This took me slightly aback. The notion of the evil eye seems so ubiquitous in human cultures. There's a very good Wikipedia entry, giving a sense of how wide-spread the idea was and is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_eye

This said, there's no great mystery as to why the evil eye could not be confined to witches: the English Bible translations had not only Solomon (in Proverbs chapters 23 and 28) but also, and crucially, Jesus using the idiom in a generalised fashion:

In the Parable of the Vineyard (Matthew, 20):

Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own? Is thine eye evil, because I am good?

So the last shall be first, and the first last: for many be called, but few chosen.

And in Mark, 7:

And he said, That which cometh out of the man, that defileth the man.

For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders,

Thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness.

Therefore English early modern culture is full of moralised reflections on evil eyes. I particularly enjoyed finding John Sheffeild's The sinfulnesse of evil thoughts, 1650, who attempts a full taxonomy:

1. The Eye of envy, is a very bad and sore Eye

2. There is an evil Eye of disdain

3. The evil Eye of suspicion

4. The Censorious Eye, is another evil eye

5. The Covetous and Greedy Eye, is another evil Eye

6. The Eye of adultery is another evil eye

7. The malicious and revengefull Eye is a devilish evil Eye

8. The Unnaturall and Ungracious Eye of children to their parents

I dragged myself away from all this useful wisdom (you have to imagine that he moralises upon each of his eight categories, in this kind of vein: "The harlots eye-lids are very dangerous").


Is it possible to move an association of evil eyes and witches closer to the date of the play? In some senses, yes, it is. Authors writing about classical witches use the idea.

W. L., Gent, in his 1628 translation of Virgil's Eclogues, says that "Such an Eye the Shepherd in the third Eglogue complaines had looked upon his Lambs: this kind of mischievous looking he calls Fascination: Pliny (out of Cicero,) reports, that there are some women born with Eyes, having duplices papillas, the apples or pupils of their eyes double: & that such doe naturally faescinum circumferre, beare about them this kind of Eyewitchcraft, (as I may term it.)" After various examples of eye power (Basilisks and the like), he concludes that "wee may easily believe the witchcraft, and mischief of an  evil Eye, to be a most true conclusion."

John Gaule, a witch-believer, but a critic of Matthew Hopkins, wrote in his Select cases of conscience touching witches and witchcrafts (1646) about the ways that witches bewitch their victims (this is just the start of his list):

"Let me instance more expressly in a few particulars, 1. Some work their bewitchings only by way of Invocation, or Imprecation. They wish it, or will it; and so it falls out. 2. Some by way of Emissary; sending out their Imps, or Familiars, to cross the way, justle, affront, flash in the Face, bark, howl, bite, scratch, or otherwise infest. 3. Some by Inspecting, or looking on, but to glare, or squint, or peep at with an envious and evil eye."

The respected Scottish divine John Weemes produced (oh dear) A TREATISE OF THE FOURE DEGENERATE SONNES, The ATHEIST, the MAGITIAN, the IDOLATER, and the JEW in 1636. He has a lot to say about evil eyes:

But Weemes would have so much to say, because he was Scottish, and Gaelic cultures seem to have a more extensive repertoire of folklore about the evil eye. In English authors, the term 'eye-biting' is used, and associated with Irish beliefs by the tireless Reginald Scot::

"The Irishmen addict themselves wonderfully to the credit and practise hereof; insomuch as they affirm, that not only their children, but their cattle, are (as they call it) eye-bitten, when they fall suddenly sick, and term one sort of their Witches eye-biters".

Thomas Ady, a sceptic like Scot, describes the bad consequences:

"Master Scot in his Discovery telleth us, That our English people in Ireland, whose posterity were lately barbarously cut off, were much given to this Idolatry in the Queens time, insomuch that there being a Disease amongst their Cattel that grew blind, being a common Disease in that Country, they did commonly execute people for it, calling them eye-biting Witches."

Scot gives a summary of beliefs about how the evil eye operated based on Leonardus Varius, De fascino libri tres. In quibus omnes fascini species et causae optima methodo describuntur, et ex philosophorum ac theologorum sententiis scitè et eleganter explicantur: nec non contra praestigias, imposturas, illusionesque daemonum, cautiones et amuleta praescribuntur: ac denique nugae, quae de iisdem narrari solent, dilucidè confutantur. (Venice, 1589, and Paris, 1583).

Varius gave a whole process for fascination, an account of how it works at the bodily level. Scot reports this account of how a human being, usually female, can focus and intensify natural influences, holding it (as is his manner) at arm's length as an interestingly awful of thinking before moving in to the kill at the end: 

"But I may not omit here the reasons which they bring to prove what bodies. are the more apt and effectual to execute the art of fascination. And that is first they say, the force of celestial bodies, which indifferently communicated their virtues unto Men, Beasts, Trees, Stones, &c. But this gift and natural influence of fascination may be increased in man, Note in marg:  L. Vair. lib. de fascin. 1. c. 12. according to his affections and perturbations, as through anger, fear, love, hate, &c. For by hate (saith Varius) entereth a fiery inflammation into the eye of man, which being violently sent out by beams and streams, &c. infect and bewitch those bodies against whom they are opposed. And therefore he saith (in the favour of women) that is the cause that women are oftener found to be Witches than men. For (saith he) they have an unbridled force of fury and concupiscence naturally, that by no means it is possible for them to temper or moderate the same. So as upon every trifling occasion, they (like brute beast) fix their furious eyes upon the party whom they bewitch.  Note in marg:  Much like the Eye-biting Witches, of whom we have elsewhere spoken. Hereby it cometh to pass, that whereas women having a marvellous fickle nature, what grief soever happeneth unto them, immediately all peaceableness of mind departeth; and they are so troubled with evil humours, that outgo their venemous exhalation, engendered through their ill-favoured diet; and increased by means of their pernicious excrements which they expel. Women are also (saith he) monthly filled full of superfluous humors, and with them the melancholic blood boileth; whereof spring vapours, and are carried up, and conveyed through the nostrils and mouth, &c. to the bewitching of whatsoever it meeteth: For they belch up a certain breath, wherewith they bewitch whomsoever they list.  Note in marg:  Who are most likely to bewitch bewitch and to be bewitched. And of all other women, lean, hollow-eyed, old, beetle-browed women (saith he) are the most infectious. Marry he saith, that hot, subtil, and thin bodies are most subject to be bewitched, if they be moist, and all they generally, whose veins, pipes, and passages of their bodies are open. And finally he saith, that all beautiful things whatsoever, are soon subject to be bewitched; as namely goodly young men, fair women, such as are naturally born to be rich, goodly Beasts, fair Horses, rank Corn, beautiful Trees, &c. Yea a friend of his told him, that he saw one with his eye break a precious stone in pieces. And all this he telleth as soberly, as though it were true. And if it were true, honest women may be Witches, in despite of all Inquisitors: neither can any avoid being a Witch, except she lock herself up in a chamber."

Or we have William Bishop in 1608: "Phisitions tel us of a perilous eye-sore called in Latin Fascinatio, Englished the Eye-biting: it appeareth most, when from a cancered stomach boiling with malice, certain venomous vapours ascend into the eyes, and flowing from them doe infect young and tender things, whereof the Poët [he means Virgil] speaketh: Nescio quis teneros oculus mihi fascinat agnos; 'I wote not what biting eye hath blasted my tender lambs'. This contagious eye-malady, is to our purpose described more properly in the book of Wisdom".

This is Philemon Holland translating Pliny (1634), and talking about apotropaic charms: "We see it is an ordinary thing, that if a stranger come in place where a babe lieth in the cradle, or look upon the said infant whiles it is asleep, the nurse useth to spit thrice: although I am not ignorant that there is a religious opinion of this syllable 'Mu', that it is able to defend such young sucklings; as also of the foolish puppet Fascinus; both which are of power to put back any witchcraft from them, and return the mischief upon the eye-biting witch." 

They were fully aware of the phallic amulets used by the Romans to protect children from the evil eye (image from the Wikipedia 'evil eye' entry, the phallus of the dwarfish figure swings behind him):

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0062:entry=malus-oculus-harpers 

http://quod.lib.umich.edu/d/did/did2222.0000.729/--curse?rgn=main;view=fulltext  

So, did 'witches' in England have the evil eye? I think, not till the mid 17th century. John Gaule seems to be the first secure instance I have found (1646). That's a 150 year OED antedating. Yet they seem to have some repertoire of charms against the evil eye, and were willing to hang Irish 'eye-biters'.

This is William Hooke, in his New Englands teares for old Englands feares (1640): "it is commonly observed, that men and women who have turned Witches, and been in league with the devil, thereby to doe mischief, are never given over so to doe, till they begin to have an evil eye, which grieveth at the Prosperity, and rejoyceth at the misery of others. Hence Witchcraft is described by an evil eye." 

He's talking about witches, but envisages a process in which pacted witches acquire an evil eye after the moralised and generalised fashion given in Solomon and in the gospels.

Yet eyes do crop up witchcraft accusations. This was Goodcole's really strange note about Elizabeth Sawyer. He's asking about how she came to be deprived of an eye, because he must have heard that one of her parents had suffered similarly (his syntax in the marginal note is muddled). His question seems to be connected to his next question, which is about whether she actually touched as well as saw the devil - there was nothing wrong with her eye, the devil was also there to be touched:

In 1612, Thomas Potts wrote this about Janet Device: "This odious Witch was branded with a preposterous mark in Nature, even from her birth, which was her left eye, standing lower then the other; the one looking down, the other looking up, so strangely deformed, as the best that were present in that Honorable Assembly, and great Audience, did affirm, they had not often seen the like."

It looks to me as though Jesus using 'evil eye' (as something any self-seeking or malignant person might have) kept the notion of a witch's evil eye in the background in the bible-fixated culture of early modern England. The witch fitted well enough to the idea, though, as a conduit for intensified 'influence'. The notion that you could simply be born with the evil eye (seventh daughter of a seventh daughter type of category) and only use it by accident, or even spend your life carefully NOT looking at things you might inadvertently kill is also around, especially in Ireland. A witch acquires an evil eye from the devil, and means to use it.

Wikipedia explains that evil eyes are blue. (But we all knew that.)

On this day in 1621: remembering Elizabeth Sawyer, convicted witch.

Three hundred and ninety five years ago today, Elizabeth Sawyer was led out to her hanging at Tyburn, after having been found guilty of the murder by witchcraft of Agnes Ratcleife.

Candidly described in the sole surviving report of her life and death as 'a very ignorant woman', Sawyer had lost her temper during her trial: 

"she was not able to speake a sensible or ready word for her defense, but sends out in the hearing of the Judge, Jury, and all good people that stood by, many most fearefull imprecations for destruction against her selfe then to happen, as heretofore she had wished and indeavoured to happen on divers of her neighbours: the which the righteous Judge of Heaven, whom she thus invocated, to judge then and discerne her cause, did reveale."

There's a sense that what she said in court (in this fashion) was the reason for her conviction. Certainly Henry Goodcole, the Chaplain of Newgate, who hastily wrote up his account of her conviction and the confession he finally got from her  ("though with great labour it was extorted from her"), shaped up and framed her story as a caution for all against blaspheming. He concludes: 

"Deare Christians, lay this to heart, namely the cause, and first time, that the Divell came unto her, then, even then when she was cursing, swearing, and blaspheming ... Stand on your guard and watch with sobrietie to resist him, the Divell your adversary, who waiteth on you continually, to subvert you that so you, that doe detest her abhominable wordes, and wayes, may never taste of the cup nor wages of shame and destruction, of which she did in this life..."

Her blasphemies seem to have caught everybody's attention. These days, we are fascinated by familiars, but plenty of witches had plenty of familiars in animal form without getting a play written about them. You can see their interest: Goodcole has her say:

"The first time that the Divell came unto me was, when I was cursing, swearing and blaspheming; he then rushed in upon me ... the first words that hee spake unto me were these: 'Oh! have I now found you cursing, swearing, and blaspheming? now you are mine.'"

And he adds a side note, reporting a spectator's extraordinary interest - he can't seem to get over it:

"A Gentleman by name Mr. Maddox standing by, and hearing of her say the word blaspheming, did aske of her, three or foure times, whether the Divell sayd 'Have I found you blaspheming?', and shee confidently sayd', 'Ay'."

Mr Maddox then disappears. He ought properly to appear among the list of names who attest to the truth that what is recorded was her confession. Goodcole promises this a couple of times in his text, but the names never got added. Doubtless Goodcole ran out of time.

Blasphemy as the moment of diabolic access went directly into the play Dekker, Ford and Rowley wrote about her.

But enough: almost 400 years later, that play has featured largely in my professional life as a university teacher. I think I know just about everything one can know, through the strange refractions of the pamphlet and the play. It is like peering into a fog, in which you can just about hear a voice, angry and lost.

The Witch of Edmonton at The Swan, Stratford

I rolled up to the Swan at Stratford on Wednesday 19^th with a party of students who will be taking my ‘Witchcraft and Drama’ course next term to see the current production of The Witch of Edmonton. These are a few notes of my impressions, and no doubt pedantic. As I was saying subsequently to a colleague, if I were directing any such play, my cast would have to act all the footnotes, and the production would last four and a half hours.

Jay Simpson as Tom the Devil-Dog, Eileen Atkins as Mother Sawyer, and set design.

First, the stage setting is excellently well conceived, simple and effective: the apron part of the stage bare, but textured, the rear part of the stage a thicket of stylised reeds or withies. This brilliantly suggests a margin, a wilderness, a world that’s just outside the Christian parish. From here, Elizabeth Sawyer emerges, and the devil Tom, or it is where the villagers conduct panicky searches.

I was less entirely persuaded by the costuming. Eileen Atkins is in suitable grey. I had some feeling that, having come up with the stage set, and the splendid attire for Jay Simpson as the devil dog, the designer took rest on her laurels. Specifically, I thought Frank Thorney was inattentively costumed: too down-at-heel for a character who is indeed a servant, but who aspires to be more than that, a pretentious talker who would be more conscious, in his attire, of the image he’s projecting.

Jim Dale in Carry on Stabbing, no, apologies, Ian Bonar as Frank Thorney

So to the direction by Gregory Doran, which has been much praised by the critics. It did seem to me that the audience were getting the point of Frank – as, quite early on, in the laughter at his ‘Am I a talker?’ This even though that character and his tangled affairs must come as a challenge to all that part of the audience that don’t know the play. I hadn’t really noticed just how close to a confession to Susan Frank gets (prior to the actual murder).

A director works with what she or he has, and in this case, Doran had Eileen Atkins out of retirement to play the role of Mother Sawyer. Atkins has the presence, the age, and the ability. But I was surprised that her Sawyer was so lucid, so wry: Atkins makes her intelligent, wary of the devil when he first appears, gives her soliloquies as steady exposition direct to the audience. I anticipated a Mother Sawyer wrapped up in her own anger, a fury who will bring the devil down on Edmonton. “Be not so furious”, says the Justice to her during their crucial conversation in Act IV. But Eileen Atkins was not being ‘furious’, but perceptive, witty, even low-key.

Atkins as Mother Sawyer

I can imagine that at her years Eileen Atkins has the right to set her own pace and tone. But her refusal to tear a cat made for a strange balance in the production, for a lot of the characters in the sub action are involved in the moral melodrama Ford wrote for them, with much pointing and shouting. Winifred, for instance: I don’t think I had ever really registered just what an extensive role that is in the play. I don’t think any performer could make sense of it all, Shvorne Marks seemed to me involved more in taking up some of the shouty slack left to hand by Atkins’ low-key Mother Sawyer and missed the occasional chance to suggest that Winifred can be aware of what clap-trap she talks.

Ian Bonar had the Frank Thorney role, and has been praised by the reviewers. I think neither he nor his director had really seen through to the unpleasant depths of Frank. He is played as young man in a frightful mess, and distressed about what he has stumbled in to. Frank Thorney deserves closer scrutiny than that: you can see him thinking about murder quite unprompted (as in his ominous protestation to Susan, "thou art so rare a goodness, as death would rather put itself to death, than murther thee"). He might also be suspected of a half-formed notion that once his father has settled his inheritance, he might find a way to off his old dad before any changes get made to the favourable settlement.

Doran’s direction is chiefly to blame. Unaccountably, with Tom the devil dog half-hidden in the reeds, the diabolic insight that (about Frank’s murder) ‘The mind’s about it now, / One touch from me soon sets the body forward’ was NOT followed up by any touch from the devil. This baulks at the clear requirements made by the text. One of my students objected reasonably enough that a touch was an inadequate representation of the devil taking control. But through the whole text the importance of the devil’s touch is apparent, as in these passages and stage directions:

1.      Sawyer  … first upon him I’ld be reveng’d.

Dog.
Thou shalt: Do but name how.

Sawyer.
Go, touch his life.

Dog.
I cannot.

Sawyer.
Hast thou not vow'd? Go, kill the slave…

Dog. …His Cattle
And Corn, I'll kill and mildew: but his life
(Until I take him, as I late found thee,
Cursing and swearing) I have no power to touch…

2.      .....

Dog. Now for an early mischief and a sudden:
The minde's about it now. One touch from me
Soon sets the body forward…

3.      … Sawy.
Touch her.
Radcliffe. Oh my Ribs are made of a paynd Hose, and they break.

4.      SD: dog rubs him

5.      SD As they whisper, enter at one end o'th' Stage Old Carter and Katharine, Dog at th' other, pawing softly at Frank.

Doran needs to read the text he’s directing a bit more closely. Sawyer makes the explicit pact with the devil, Frank’s pact is implicit, but he is weak and wicked enough to allow the devil to prompt his evil. Look how his words to Susan, in rising anger ‘So, I shall have more trouble. Thank you for that’ are made by the touch of the dog into a partial acknowledgement of the devil’s prompting, ‘Thank you for that. Then I’ll ease all at once’:

Speech and SD in the 17th century text

Similarly I think there’s warrant for bringing the devil back into our view at the end of Act IV, for Frank’s closing couplet:

I have served thee, and my wages now are paid,

Yet my worst punishment shall, I hope, be stayed.

Who is Frank talking to, alone here? Obviously, the departing Old Carter, but it could be to the devil he can’t quite see, but who is there (or at least, would be there if an attentive director brought him into sight). The 17^th century text was urgently instructive about how we give the devil access to us, if we blaspheme, or have evil thoughts.

Did Doran conceive that the play would be more acceptable to the audience at The Swan if he denied the devil his ‘touch’ on Frank? There may be some reason to suspect that he ducked out of potentially difficult moments. I cannot conceive for a moment why Faye Castelow as the wretched Susan, brought in by her father as a corpse in a coffin, did not, as the text requires, open her eye to glare accusingly at her murderer, Frank, who cries out: 'For pities sake, remove her: see, she stares with one broad open eye still in my face.' Did he not understand it? Did he blench at it? Either explanation is unsatisfactory. Elizabeth Sawyer, as the play mentions in passing, was one-eyed. The moment passes from the evil supernatural of Mother Sawyer, to the dead Susan, now operating in the realm of the good supernatural, like a corpse bleeding afresh in the presence of the murderer. Interestingly, Liz Crowther as the mad Anne Radcliffe did in extremis, see the devil, and that was very effective.

My students were most bemused by the end, unable to believe the level of forgiveness extended to Frank by Old Carter and the other villagers. Once again, I had to feel that Eileen Atkins’ Mother Sawyer, going more or less quietly to her fate, was partly to blame. There wasn’t a strong enough contrast established between her partial repentance (but actually it is quite clear admission of insufficient contrition when she says she wishes she still had Tom to help her) and Frank’s lengthy words before his exit to the gallows. The dramatists overreached, and thought they could finesse this contrast, and perhaps it did work for the audience in 1621, ever willing to hear penitent sinners. For us, it’s just another display of Frank’s glib way with words. The more sincere he tries to sound, the worse he sounds (at least to us).

The villagers were all rather clean looking. Come on now, Old Banks is under demonic compulsion to kiss his cow’s backside every ten times an hour. Can’t he be a bit a bit mucky-faced as a result? The morris dance was superb: an adequate sort of dance was going on until Tom and devil dog gets hold of Old Sawgut’s fiddle, and plays, and then a frenzy descends on all participants and witnesses to the dance. Cuddy Bank's hobby horse was a horse's skull, as in the witchcraft art of Oostsanen or others up to Jan Svankmajer.

Suitably unchristian looking morris men.

 Dafydd Llyr Thomas could have been tubbier still as Cuddy Banks, the role Rowley wrote for himself. The scene where Tom assumes the shape of Kate Carter to lure Cuddy into a pond was surprisingly effective. I think the actress must have filled her voluminous skirts with a mist of dry ice, she floated all the way across the apron stage on wreathes of smoke. The final expository dialogue between Cuddy and Tom was rather wearing. I don’t think it has to be, but that Jay Simpson was coasting on the strength of how super he looks, and Daffyd Llyr Thomas was still too much in role as Cuddy. Both characters are slightly out of their usual parts here, the dog oddly inclined to reveal, Cuddy more intelligent than usual. I think they could have done that dialogue with less performance, and greater lucidity and speed.