Notre Dame, Paris, 1625 - a devout special effect goes wrong

“The King of Canadaes Son, by meanes of the intercourse of traffique between the French and that Savage Nation, having, at the suite of these holy compassers of Sea and Land, beene sent by his Father into France, and there entertained at their Colledge in Paris, with the quintessence of Jesuiticall discipline, for the space of two yeares, was at length presented a learned Catechumenist in the Cathedrall Church of our Lady to be baptized; where in the presence of a Congregation, as great as the Church was capable of, the King himself was his Godfather, and gave him his owne name [the king was Louis III], but when the sacrament was administered, such a cracke was heard from a secret Scaffold provided for the nonce, that the whole multitude was much astonished, fearing least the Church would have fallen on their heads, wherof the holy fathers being well apayed [gratified] to see their plot had taken effect, one of them catching his cue, and beckning with the finger for audience, began to tell them, that they had no cause to feare at all, but rather to rejoice, and glorifie God, who had honoured the baptisme of this Savage Prince with a miracle, in token of the conversion of that whole Nation, wherof himselfe was now the first fruits: But while he was yet speaking, the paper wherein the miracle was wrought came smoking downe among the company, and brought such a stinke of Gunpowder with it, that every one with his nose in his hand began to leave the place, and get him away, some smiling, others blushing, and last of all the new Christian also, leaving his religion where he had found his baptisme. For being not long after brought into England with the French ships, taken by some of our merchants in their Canada voyage, he himselfe related the story, protesting it to be true, with many more of the like nature, for which, he said, he did much abominate the Romish religion, and thereupon became conformable to the Church of England.”

If this incident occurred, the ‘King of Canada’s son’ must have been a Huron Indian whose status back in his own country had been inflated for the sake of some pious propaganda. The Huron tribes were at this time willing to accept Jesuit missions; these were very much ‘embedded’ in nature, as the Jesuit missionaries tried first to understand the people they were converting by living with them, and to some extent adopting their ways. But ‘Canada’ of course did not exist as a nation, the Iroquois were unappeasable in their war against the Huron, nor could the European settlers help them. This article from the Catholic Encyclopedia is a long record of disaster:

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07565a.htm

Anyway, the relation has it that at the formal baptism in Notre Dame of this purported Prince, a charge of gunpowder had been set somewhere high in the building, so fused that it exploded noisily during the administration of the sacrament. Consternation followed this ‘miracle’, as well it might. Whether the explosion was meant to signify the devil (say, ‘Okee’) departing the scene, or a clap of divine thunder by way of heavenly approval isn’t clear. But the artificers had not thought it all the way through: down drifted the smoking remnants of their firework, and the fraud became apparent even as one of the devoutly inspired contrivers was trying to capitalize upon it.

I half incline to accept the story as genuine, even though the context is solid English anti-catholicism. Baptisms were moments of ideological triumph. The implacable Iroquois themselves recognized as much, in their sadistic use of scalding baptisms in killing missionary priests

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesuit_missions_in_North_America ).

But the notion that the ‘prince’ of the Huron witnessed such a fraud perpetrated by Catholic Christians, but then was subsequently willing to join the Church of England is just too incredible.

My source for this dubious anecdote is, as I say, not a neutral one. It is thrown in at the end of this pamphlet: A relation of the deuill Balams departure out of the body of the Mother-Prioresse of the Ursuline nuns of Loudun Her fearefull motions and contorsions during the exorcisme …Or the first part of the play acted at Loudun by two divels, a frier, and a nun. Faithfully translated out of the French copie, with some observations for the better illustration of the pageant (1636).

The pamphlet consists of, first, a translation from a French source of a Catholic account of this exorcism of Balam from the famous Jean des Anges, then the English author’s own debunking commentary. Finally, the anonymous author presents the anecdote I have transcribed as a comic ‘jig’ or afterpiece to his main drama. Whoever the author was, he was strongly influenced by Samuel Harsnett’s attacks on the ‘devil theatre’ of earlier Catholic exorcists (this can be seen in the theatrical figure already developed in the title).

The pamphlet itself is an indication that there was some perturbation about the effect of the ‘miracles’ going off in Loudon. Walter Montagu had been present at this exorcism, and converted, the dramatist Thomas Killigrew was there, and put his name down among those who testified to the inexplicable nature of what they had seen. Killigrew’s own description for a correspondent has been found and published. Put simply, Jean des Anges was undergoing the slow process of exorcism by the Jesuit Father Surin, and others. She had multiple devils in her, so the departure of Balam was just a part of the process. As this pamphleteer sourly remarks, the timing of this exorcism fell very conveniently for the English gentlemen who had traveled to Loudon to be ‘edified’.

One reads in Greenblatt about the connections Harsnett saw between these devout actions and the ‘action’ of the theatre. This pamphlet really brings it home just what levels of impersonation were reached. The devils possessing Jean des Anges are said quite simply to appear. Then you realize the obvious: that they are ‘appearing’ by taking over the body and face of the prioress. Surin interprets the appearance of the different possessing devils as they show in her facial expressions that signify their manifestations: “he appeared againe in the same shape of Iscaran … as he was in the midst of his action, he suddenly stopped, and the forme of Balam appeared in his countenance, but with an aspect sad and affrighted, yet but smiling withal, by which marke he was knowne. Then the Father told the behoulders that it was Balam, which the devil also averred, and as his face was noted to wax very pale and discoloured, the said Father said unto him: thy paleness argues thee guilty.” Jean des Anges can, with the collaboration of Father Surin, manifest individually distinct devils. In case we don’t get it, the pamphleteer explains: “for the devil are no where else to be seene or heard, but in the actions of the maid, and the tongue of the priest”.

The devil Balam, who seems to have been a very amenable sort of devil, whose arrival is signaled by Jean assuming rueful smiles, had previously said that he would soon depart, but proposed to leave a token of his departure: his name would appear on the Prioress’ arm. He remarks - with some poignancy for a devil - that by this means his name, at least, will finally get into heaven. (Balam also willingly testifies that, unlike the human observers, he can see the real presence in the sacrament.) Surin had objected to having his holy demoniac polluted in this way, and dictated that, instead, the name of St Joseph should appear. Balam had willingly divulged that St Joseph was his ‘chief enemy’ in heaven.

At the climax of this particular exorcism, Jean des Anges manifested the devil within her gnawing at her left hand, and then the name of ‘Joseph’ appeared on her right arm ‘in bloody characters’, before the witnesses.

Killigrew, a man of the theatre, had no idea of how it was done; Walter Montagu simply converted. The pamphleteer can’t really produce any clear explanation either, so (reasonably enough) he just pours scorn by way of refutation. His most rational suggestion is “if you please to write with the juice of a Limon upon a peece of paper, and afterwards hold it to the fire” you can reproduce the type of trick. But even if you can write in lemon juice on your arm, there was no obvious source of heat for Jean des Anges to hold her arm up to, to bring out the letters.

But the pamphleteer then says something fascinating, which I cannot explain, and am sure that I have seen no further references to: “or learne how the characters are made upon the armes of many that have beene at Hierusalem.”

What could that mean? He makes it sound as if Jerusalem pilgrims could return with a heat sensitive tattoo. Could you rub vigorously on your arm, and make a mysterious authentication of your pilgrimage appear? And was it ‘I ♥ Jerusalem’?

My illustration is a Canadian brave, on the title page of A New Discovery of a Vast Country in America, (1698).

Stroked by Valentine: shamanistic healing in London, 1666

Valentine Greatrakes was born on St Valentine’s Day, 1629 (and hence his name). He was Irish, a Protestant, served as a lieutenant in the Cromwellian army in Ireland for six years, then ‘betook my self to a Country life, and lived at Affane the habitation of my Ancestors, where I have continued ever since, and got by my Industry a livelihood out of the bowels of the Earth’.

Then a message from heaven changed his life, and propelled him into short blaze of fame: “About four years since I had an Impulse, or a strange persuasion in my own mind (of which I am not able to give any rational account to another) which did very frequently suggest to me that there was bestowed on me the gift of curing the Kings-Evil: which, for the extraordinariness of it, I thought fit to conceal for some time, but at length I communicated this to my Wife”.

In scrofula he had chosen an illness which, from what one has read about cures or amelioration after ‘the royal touch’, could see some patients respond well to a charismatic healer. It was also a condition that, because of its main recognized form of treatment, made his act latently political, an encroachment upon a special preserve of those who were absolutely his social superiors. Greatrakes would be reviled because he was perceived to have infringed, to have intervened repeatedly in matters that were, properly, far beyond him. Peter Elmer’s ODNB life of Greatrakes endorses a political motive, either in Greatrakes or his backers, suggesting (to paraphrase loosely) that there was an implicit rebuke to King Charles II in Greatrakes so conspicuously surpassing the monarch in this role of ‘touching’, alongside his carefully advertised piety and moderation.

The ODNB life covers the biography (obviously), but this emphasis leaves one far short of appreciating what Greatrakes did, the hysteria and squalor around the hard-pressed, sometimes revolted, but heroic and sincere thaumaturge. This is my emphasis here: in late 17^th century London – a society that considered itself Christian through-and-through - a reappearance of Shamanism.

As soon as Greatrakes was persuaded that he could also touch for the King’s-Evil, a potential patient, in a desperate condition, was found him (he reamrks elsewhere that God always found him patients promptly after his latest healing power had been imparted): “Margaret Macshane of Ballinecly … who had the Evil 7 years and upwards, which had spread it self from the bottom of her stomach upwards, all over to her throat, neck, and nose, and so all over her back, shoulders and arm-pits, so that I could not see one place free from the Evil, where you might put a sixpence, and to speak the truth she looked so dreadfully, and stunk so exceedingly.”

What he was up against is partly caught in the photograph of a sufferer here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuberculous_cervical_lymphadenitis

Greatrakes says he was (understandably) squeamish about many of his clients. But he was astonishingly successful: “My hand suppurated the Nodes, and drew and healed the Sores, which formerly I could not have endured the sight of, nor smell, nor touched them without vomiting; so great an aversion had I naturally to all wounds and sores: so that the poor woman (i.e., Macshane) about six weeks afterwards came perfectly well to my house.”

A year later further divine assurance came to Greatrakes that he must use the same cure-by-touching for the ague (there was a large local outbreak, and Greatrakes was always sincere in his sense of mission). Now the ague is an intermittent disease (malaria), and, like the successes Greatrakes would soon have with people suffering from falling sickness (epilepsy), the natural course of the condition would favour him with the appearance of success. Both Greatrakes and his supporters acknowledged that some of his clients did relapse, though this usually happened after a longer remission than was normal for them. Finally, word came to him from heaven that he could cure all most ailments. A correspondent of Joseph Granvill’s explains that Greatrakes doubted this, until one night when one of his hands was “struck dead”. But stroking this hand with his other returned it to “its former liveliness”. This experience was repeated over several nights, until Greatrakes was finally convinced of his general gift. He treated people without personally taking any money (his opponent David Lloyd asserts that his minders did take money for access to him), and the greater part of those he touched early in his career trudged back off into obscurity. Follow-up care after a miracle cure is hardly to be expected.

Large numbers flocked to Greatrakes as his fame spread. People – including the young John Flamsteed - were crossing the Irish Sea to get to him, and he was soon brought to England to attempt a cure for the migraines and general debilitating pain suffered by Lady Conway (Anne Finch, the thinker). The attempted cure failed, but with other local English clients, Greatrakes continued to have miraculous successes. He did cures in Warwickshire, and through Berkshire. Anthony a Wood says that he was finally summoned to Whitehall by the King. Now Greatrakes does not mention this himself, nor did his supporter in print, Henry Stubbe. According to Elmer (ODNB), Charles was not impressed by his emulator, so perhaps this was an aspect of his career Greatrakes wanted to pass over. Charles apparently had Sir John Denham seek a cure for his lameness, but the stroking cure failed.

In London, Greatrakes published, or there was published about him, a single sheet flier, The great cures and strange miracles performed by Mr. Valentine Gertrux who restoreth the blind to sight, the deaf to hearing, the lame to strength, and cripples to walk without crutches: as also, he cureth all manner of diseases, with a stroak of his hand and prayer.

It sounds very good: “He takes away all sorts of pain and old Aches, though of twelve, sixteen or twenty years continuance, or longer, only with stroking and smoothing the party grieved with his Hand: for immediately upon laying his Hand upon the part grieved, the pain removes; and if at any time they feel it sensibly in another part of the body; as, from the back to the breast, from thence into the Legs and Arms, or other extreme parts, and when the party telleth him where it is removed, he followeth it with his hand, which driveth it out, sometimes at the fingers ends, sometimes at the Toes, other times at the Crown of the Head, and sometimes at the Mouth; and when the person saith, it is gone, and he feeleth no more pain, He biddeth him be gone, and glorifie GOD, and forsake his sins.”

One can understand the appeal. A qualified 17^th century doctor would want high fees for a painful regime of phlebotomy and brutal purges. But even in this brief account of Greatrakes with a patient undergoing treatment, one can see that both are sharing a view of pain that is conceptually based on demonic possession. The pain is chased by Greatrakes from one part of the body to another (he explains that he relies on the patient to tell him where the pain has shifted to, he cannot drive it, only follow it). Once the pain has no retreat to the torso, Greatrakes can get it to leave via an extremity. Rather original in him are recurrent cures where the pain finally leaves by the tongue of the patient, and the tongue is discovered to be left as cold as ice.

Greatrakes is quite candid about this, he clearly regards demonic possession as a valid diagnosis for some of the afflictions he has treated: “my Experience inclines me to believe, in saying that I have met with several Instances which seemed to me to be Possessions by dumb Devils, deaf Devils, and talking Devils … many, when they have but heard my voice, and have been tormented in so strange a manner that no one that has been present could conceive it less then a Possession”.

Look how in these sentences an initial ‘somewhat within her’ becomes an ‘it’ that seems to have its own volition and malignity: “as I will instance in one at York-house … who had somewhat within her which would swell her Body to that excessive degree on a sudden as if it would burst her; and then as soon as I put my hand on that part of her Body where it did rise up, it would fly up to her Throat (or some other place), and then it would cause her neck to swell half so big again, and then almost choke her, then blind her, and make her dumb and foam … I oftentimes brought it up into her Tongue … which it has swollen in an instant nigh as big again, and has been seen plainly to play from place to place, and at length with great violence of belching … it went forth, and so the Woman went away well. Whether this were a natural Distemper, let any one judge that is either a Divine, a Philosopher, or Physician.”

He even has the same motive as the John Darrel type of renegade protestant exorcist: “God may, to abate the pride of the Papists (that make Miracles the undeniable Manifesto of the truth of their Church) make use of a Protestant to do such strange things in the face of the Sun, which they pretend to do in Cells.” Greatrakes was only an ordinary man of his time. The afflictions are as mysterious to him as his power to cure. These are essentially supernatural encounters, the power that came to him from heaven against the afflicting force.

Greatrakes does not mention any other local or family traditions of healing that might have provided other models. He presents his career as simply following the divine inspirations that came to him, but as he progressed, he become more confident, and more experienced at what had to be done. He then seems to have been more willing to undertake what must have been standard procedures of incisions and lancings. He was always going to collide with the medical profession, and he duly did, both in Ireland and in England: “Then the Judge asked me, where is your Licence for practising, as all Physitians and Chirurgeons ought to have from the Ordinary of the Diocese? my answer was, that I knew no reason I had to take a Licence, since I took no Reward from any one, and that I knew no Law of the Nation, which prohibited any person from doing what good he could to his Neighbours.”

This was in Ireland; I have possibly made a small discovery about Greatrakes in associating with his London career with a set of verses published as RUB for RUB: OR, AN ANSWER TO A PHYSICIANS PAMPHLET, STYLED, The Stroker stroked. The author here, a supporter, is writing to answer a (lost) verse attack on Greatrakes penned by a qualified physician. Now Greatrakes’ modus operandi obviously involved a lot of touching. His opponent could not resist making imputations about this (the italicized lines are clearly quotations), but was effectively answered by having this represented as products of his own lechery (a bawdy anecdote is told about the doctor administering ‘oil of man’ to a female client):

What if he clip’d and clap’d, what’s that to you?
You’ve clip’d and clap’d, and have been clap’d too …
Your foul report betrays you, and in truth,
I fear the Doctor hath a liquorish Tooth.
Her Stocking off, he strokes her Lilly-foot,
What then? The Doctor had a mind to do’t.
Her Legs, her Knees, her Thighs, a little higher.
And there’s the Doctors Center of Desire…

The sense of Greatrakes as an exorcist appears here too:

His hand is truly powerful whose stroke
Twice dispossessed and made the Devil smoke.

Greatrakes had many supporters: his ‘Brief Account’ of himself and his blameless activities is bulked out by many testimonials and witnesses, some of them gentry, some clerics. He was also susceptible to being recruited to other people’s agendas. Joseph Glanvill could use him to vapour on about latter-day apparent miracles. The unpredictable Henry Stubbe wrote the longest defence: The miraculous conformist, or, An account of severall marvailous cures performed by the stroking of the hands of Mr. Valentine Greatarick with a physicall discourse thereupon.

The title is telling. Stubbe set out to defend Greatrakes’ orthodoxy: “It may seeme equitable that I tell you why I call the Gentleman the Miraculous Conformist: many strange reports have and do run of him; but he is reclaimed from all that is fanatique; and this gift of Healing was bestowed on him, since the Restoration of his Sacred Majesty, and the restitution of the Doctrine and Discipline of the English Church”. The sensitivity concerns Greatrakes as a throw-back to the ‘fanatic’ times of the interregnum. But even as Stubbe defends by citing gentry and clerics who endorsing the cures as valid, he strays into making Greatrakes sound too Christ-like: “An infinite number of the Nobility, Gentry, and Clergy of Warwick-shire and Worcestershire, persons too understanding to be deceived, and too Honourable and Worthy to deceive, will avow, that they have seen him publicly cure the lame, the blind, the deaf, the perhaps not unjustly supposed Daemoniacks, and Lepers.”

The ‘physical discourse’ in Stubbe is just that, an attempt to apply some Royal Society-style investigative rigour in place of the possession model. Robert Boyle was interested enough to be the addressee of both Stubbe and Greatrakes, the former angling his speculations about how the cures were effected towards further investigation by the Royal Society, and though Boyle actually had objections to Stubbe’s rationalizing conclusions, he apparently attended sixty stroking sessions. Glanvill’s correspondent does the same, ingeniously speculating that what Greatrakes did was transmit a “sanative contagion” – instead of catching a disease off him, you could catch health (in A philosophical endeavor in the defence of the being of witches and apparitions, 1668). Glanvill also warmly recommends Greatrakes to scrutiny by the Royal Society.

Stubbe gave a lot of attention to Greatrakes’ own body. He was closely observed: that he was not putting some undisclosed and highly effective ointment on his hands is sagely noted, he did his cures absolutely bare handed. He had a distinctive personal odour, not unpleasant, but, again, his hands did not smell. The attempt to account for it all rationally led Stubbe into speculations about the ‘crasis’ of Greatrake’s body, in his case a perfect humoral balance and temperament. It’s not very far from seeing him as a living, breathing philosophers’ stone. “It seems to me very imaginable that there may be given by God such a Natural Crasis and Effluvia consequential thereunto, that the stroking with his Hand for some space so as to communicate the Virtue may restore the Blood and Spirits to that vigour and strength which is natural to them, and resuscitate the contracted imbecility of any part.”

Meanwhile, at his over-crowded places of practice, the curative power of Greatrake’s body was eagerly believed. We lurch backwards into the abyss of time: the Royal Society competes with diabolism for an explanation, but rearing up from the dim and distant past comes Shamanism. He imparted his touch. His saliva was used by way of finishing touch to any minor surgery he had performed. Whether his gloves had the same power, through their close contact with the wonder-working hands was investigated, and they did. But a napkin that had merely been rubbed on his chest, or his shirt, did not transmit his ‘crasis’ to the sufferer.

Either in his desperation to cope with the crowds seeking contact with him, or in his growing belief in his own powers, Greatrakes started taking along his own bottled urine for distribution as some kind of lotion (it was noted to smell like violets). This too was eagerly consumed, and was equally effective: “Eleanor Dickinson, aged 45 years, had a Dropsy 12 years in her belly … was stroked by Mr. Greatrakes about 16 days since, at 7. a clock at night, and drank at the same time about 6 spoonfuls of his water, and rubbed some of it on her body, which she did of her own accord: the same night she felt a queasiness in her stomach”. Her own testimonial brings us closer to the chaos around Greatrakes: “not being able to come near him by reason of the throng, she snatched some of his urine and drank it, some of which she also put into her ears, which were so stopped she could not hear, and immediately she heard the noise of the people all round about her: Then going home, some hours after the same urine began to work in her belly…”

This is Shamanistic healing: the body fluids of the healer being consumed, a belief that the healer is a conduit for a supernatural force that he allows you to access, his body processing the occult power into something that you can use for a cure.

With chaotic scenes like these taking place in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, Greatrakes was attracting so much attention that attacks on his methods and character was inevitable. We have seen that there was a verse attack by a jealous doctor. David Lloyd’s Wonders no miracles overflows with indignation and paranoia. Lloyd was a chaplain at the Charter House, where Greatrakes had both performed cures and had a bad failure. Lloyd sees that Greatrakes has a popular following for what people think he can do, and professes alarm that soon he might start being followed for what he tells people. For Lloyd, it’s an imperative that Greatrakes be disbelieved, as he represents “An opportunity in distracted and divided Times, to broach strange and dangerous Opinions. For if a man can but prevail with the People, to believe that God assists him, to Effect new and extraordinary things; he may easily persuade them, that the same God inspires him to speak new and extraordinary Opinions; when they see God in what he doth, they will easily believe he is in what he saith; and where they observe omnipotence, there they will believe infallibility: and if the man saith now, I received a voice from Heaven, bidding me Cure all Diseases; he may if this take, say anon, I am Commissioned by a Voice from Heaven, to reduce the World to the unity of the Roman Church, to teach the infallibility of the Pope, to reveal a Messiah to come, a fifth Monarchy, and what not?”

Lloyd is either not interested in, or incapable of a reasoned or balanced response. Greatrakes was obviously hurt by the imputations made about his character, and, well accustomed to getting testimonials, produced witnesses to attest otherwise (and they seem convincing). Henry Stubbe’s work was also prompted by Lloyd’s vitriolic hatred. Lloyd, for instance, was willing to see Greatrakes as under diabolical guidance: “In a word, should a man have familiarity and make a compact with Satan, and should the Lord permit Satan to work some strange things, not that Satan can do any thing above nature; but that he may do many things that seem to us above nature, because above our understanding, it might exercise and try our Faith” and a harbinger to a diabolic attempt to overthrow the Church of England.

Probably the overtures made by Greatrakes and Stubbe to Robert Boyle were an attempt to find shelter and, ideally, legitimization. Boyle’s brother has been an early patron of Greatrakes over in Ireland. But protection does not seem to have come quickly enough. London gave just too much publicity, and no chance to control the nature of the stories getting out. Anthony a Wood said Greatrakes went to “Whitehall by command from his Majesty and performing several cures there and in London, but more mistakes”. And David Lloyd scores a shrewd hit about Greatrakes’ star waning: “they follow him not in any place so eagerly at first, as they leave him discontentedly at last: He is not so much cried up in the places where he comes, as he is cried down in the places where he hath been”.

Greatrakes, Elmer says, had gone back to Ireland by May 1666. He continued to stroke away ailments, but without publicity.

The staggering name to see as testifying to two of his cures is Andrew Marvell. The shrewd, cautious Marvell, attending Shamanistic séances!

(Greatrakes’ story is also told in the biographical dictionary issued by the subject of my previous post, James Granger, who ends by saying that Greatrakes stroked his female patients in a rather different way to his male patients, though it’s hard to tell whether this is exoneration or insinuation.)

Richard Dugdale, the Surey Demoniac, 1695

This young man was one Richard Dugdale. He’s in his preferred costume as ‘the Surey demoniack’. ‘Surey’ in this case has nothing to do with the county of Surrey. ‘The Surey’ was in Lancashire, near Whalley (and present day Stonyhurst College). It was a large barn that seems to have been a kind of early modern village hall: ‘the Surey was a common Receptacle for all the young ladies in the Neighbour-hood to come on Spinning at; a custom used in the North’, a building the landlord allowed to be used for communal work and the festivities associated with local ‘rushbearings’.

We are in very late 17^th century Lancashire, my informant about this is the trenchant Zachary Taylor, the Samuel Harsnett of his day, who gave a full account (in The Surey imposter being an answer to a late fanatical pamphlet, entituled The Surey demoniack, 1697) of what went on. This he did initially with what might reasonably be taken for a good humour born of confidence that his insights and documentary evidence would explode these follies. In his subsequent work on this matter, the obstinacy of his opponents leaves him exasperated and angry (this is in his Popery, superstition, ignorance, and knavery, very unjustly by a letter in the general pretended but as far as was charg’d, very fully proved upon the dissenters that were concerned in the Surey imposture, 1698).

I am not aware of any comparable 17^th century English depiction of a demoniac. Taylor must have had the woodcut made because, to his mind, Dugdale’s use of costume is amongst the evidence which shows that the ‘demoniac’ was perfectly aware of himself and the effect he was making:

“Another argument that R. was sometimes sensible in his pretended Fits, and only play’d the Knave, is the odd Dresses that he affected to habit himself in: I will give you an account of one, which is thus. R. takes a large coarse Blanket, and Mantles himself in it; one of the Corners he so orders, that as occasion is, with a nod he may drop it over his Face, or with a toss back fling it like a Monks Cowl upon his Shoulders; the opposite Corner he reserves for a long Train to trail after him as he frisk’d it about. In this fantastick Garb, he traverseth the Barn, and comes pretty close up to whom he thought it would more powerfully affect, and gives a nod with his Head, and flap goes a Corner of the Blanket on his Face; then he gives another toss of it back again, stands upon his Tip toes, and stares and heaves, as he would fly away. Whisk about then he turns to another, so to a third, &c. Thus he keeps the People in Fears, and expectation of what’s to be done…”

Taylor’s faintly indulgent amusement at Dugdale and his antics does not extend to the demoniac’s major dupes, a group of ‘fanatic’ dissenting ministers who, like John Darrel before them, were determined to show that the Protestant church can exorcise the possessed effectively, that they can carry out by godly prayer and fasting what the Catholic church claimed exclusively for itself, and attempted (as they saw it) via superstitious ritual. In Taylor’s persuasive analysis of what was really going at stake, the six errant ministers were not just the dupes of Dugdale and his family, but, more dangerously, the Dugdales were actually being run by two Catholic priests. The elaborate set-up in this late contest between the two churches, ritual against prayer, involved Dugdale as a fake demoniac, who would fail to respond to Protestant exorcists: the Catholic exorcists would then sweep in and show that their rite of exorcism was effective where Protestants had failed. There’s a rather guileless moment in the pamphlet written by one of the deceived ministers, Thomas Jollie, when the clerics, fatigued by their recurrent fasts and the physical and mental rigours of their attempted exorcisms, and seeing no improvement, round on Richard and his family:

“On Jan. the 9th, Was a Fast-day for him at the Surey, the Ministers dealt plainly, and particularly with Richard, and them, where he lived, suspecting that the success of their endeavours was hinder’d by their little sense or improvem[en]t of this sad Judgment…”

The family were (the frustrated ministers said) not sorrowful enough about the judgment visited on them in Richard’s possession, and this was protracting the process of exorcism. They were also suspected of suppressing other material facts to the detriment of the rite: “by their slowness in confessing all they knew of a more full Contract with Satan, than what had been discover’d”. Worst of all, “there were reports of their Corresponding with P. and H. Popish Priests, which however they denied”. After this showdown, Richard complied, with a show of improvement. The ingenious Dugdale family were in a position to exploit both sets of potential exorcists, and were probably ready, in the end, to sell the moment of dispossession to the highest bidder.

The Richard Dugdale show, while it ran, was a sensation: the local landlord complained about the gathering crowds trampling his crops, and Thomas Jollie (one of the credulous ministers) reports of one occasion “there being that Night about or above a Thousand People, labouring to throng into the Barn”.

This large gathering of people seems to have created its own air of licence: the extreme disinhibition of Dugdale’s performance was apparently contagious. In the 1634 play of The Late Lancashire Witches, a ‘satanical sisterhood’ meets at a barn, in a sabbath of jollity and feasting, rather than anything orgiastic. The Surey barn ‘Satanalia’ (to coin a word) turned more overtly sexual, if Zachary Taylor is to be believed: “the neighbourhood affirm, that there was never such Whoring heard of, as whilst the Ministers kept up these Meetings, they scarce being able to go into the Fields, but they found Men and Women Trading almost under every Hedge”. The exorcising Protestant ministers were themselves unimpressed with the moral character of the locals, who were “all professed Protestants, tho' they had been Popishly brought up, and lead profane lives in a place, where Iniquity did so abound, as some Judgment might justly be expected upon, or among them”.

The other members of the Dugdale family were all mobilized to assist Richard in his physical antics and his moments of oracular prescience: “His Sisters, as I am well inform’d, were constantly plying about to bring in Informations”, says Taylor. He also remarks that Dugdale’s performance area in the barn had hiding places where objects could be left for him to pick up, convey to his mouth (this would have been most easily done when he was hidden by his blanket), and then disgorge.

As for Richard himself, he was in his element. Taylor produces remarkably relevant testimonies from men who had been at school with Richard – for they had seen it all before, or things even more extreme, from a young man they vividly remembered as (in modern terms) a hyperactive attention-seeker. At school, the young Richard often “Turned in the Sight of his Eyes, and nothing but the Whites appear’d; he would have stirred the Skin upon his Skull to and fro, without any motion of the Head; the hair on his Head seeming thereby to stand on an end: By the management of his Tongue, he would have made many and several kinds of hideous and unusual Noises, like Dogs, Cats &c to me often seeming as if it were quite below the throat. I have seen him in several of his Fits, but then saw nothing done by him, but what he much exceeded when a School-boy.” I suppose every schoolteacher is bound to meet with this type of pupil, given to freakish behaviour.

Taylor’s unnamed correspondent also recollects that Dugdale used to claim to have had regular encounters with a witch who taught him these various alarming tricks: “He often said, he met an old Witch in his coming and going betwixt his Fathers House and the School, which he called Sadler’s Wife; and that she had Tew’d him (as he calls it) in his coming or going, as made him sweat extreamly”. ]I think ‘Tew’d’ must mean ‘tutored’.]

Richard Dugdale could imitate the sounds and movements of animals (his act as horse even extended to eating equine provender), he could dance with tireless energy while on his knees, ventriloquise, and do contortions: “he oft stretch’d out his Neck to a prodigious length towards the Ministers that prayed”. One thing that very much impressed those who testified to the truth of the possession (as cited by Jollie), was his ability to seem either very light or very heavy (he probably had family assistants working among the witnesses who experienced this supernatural effect, and either covertly lifting or weighing him down). His sisters, gossiping purposefully with their female friends, could pick up all kinds of news from across the region, which he could produce, as if it were Satan’s knowledge of all that pertained to him.

One major performance type Richard would have seen was the clergyman in the pulpit, and so Dickie had Satan, residing within him, deliver long homilies. Jollie guilelessly reports that “here Satan described much of the nature and sorts of Hell Torments, at a more lively and terrible rate than ever the By-standers knew done by Mens Books or Sermons, insomuch that many things then spoken by the Devil about Hell, being afterwards collected, and so far as clear Scripture proof for them was found, formed into a Discourse.” Dugdale would also impersonate gentlemen playing bowls or cards, and like demoniacs before him act out their sins, making a moral commentary, while disclaiming all conscious knowledge of how to play.

Dugdale, a born performer, dancer, and physical clown, had a large audience at last, and seems most of all to have wanted to display his dancing. The exorcists went along with this, in that they were eager (as puritan-minded dissenting ministers) to push a story that Satan had entered into Richard after an unusual version of the Faustian pact, in which Richard had given himself to the devil in return for becoming a good dancer: “Said the Minister, What Wish and Vow was that? Satan answered, Dicky wisht he might be a good Dancer, saying, He’de give himself to the Devil, might he but excel others in Dancing; upon which many of the By-standers struck with wonder, declared how they heard Richard speak those words, when he having a mind to dance with a Young Woman, because he could not dance well, another that could dance better, was prefer’d before him; Dancing then being much labour’d after, and prided in their way as a rare Accomplishment.” Obviously men like Jollie would view dancing as part of the immorality of the region, and seek to make Dugdale a moral example of what became of you if you went in for clog-dancing. Zachary Taylor says that Dugdale told him that he never said any such thing as the words reported, though it seems to me quite likely that Dugdale knew he was a very athletic dancer, and wanted to make dancing central to his fits via this convenient lead-in.

Despite the grueling schedule of his one man show, Richard was thriving. Thomas Jollie finds it miraculous that “Richard being tossed so by Satan, and dasht against the ground, had not his Head split in pieces, his Bones broken, his Spirits spent, or Body more disorder’d, but seem’d rather bigger and more plump, and in far better liking, when out of his Fits, then ever he was before”. Pleased with himself, and enjoying enormous amounts of attention, not in the slightest bit ill (no hysteria, no epilepsy, no lockjaw), and perfectly in control of the situation, Richard could not stop himself manifesting some contempt for his clerical dupes.

He made a speciality of spitting with extraordinary accuracy at the minister John Carrington. A spitting demoniac was not a new thing, of course, and there were local Lancashire examples which might have helped prompt him. But Dickie Dugdale was (unsurprisingly in the light of his other physical accomplishments), extraordinarily good at it:

“at last the Daemoniack threw his head so among the People that were betwixt him and one of the Ministers, as that a Ball of Flegm strangely glanted among them without weting any, till it slap’d on his Shoulder, and thence flash’d o’re his Face, and all down his Cloaths, Richard’s Tongue and Eyes being inactive herein, as abovesaid; whilst this flowed from his Breast, What amazing hideous sounds were heard in or from him all along! Sometimes as of Swine, or Water-mills, or as if a Bear and other Wild Beasts had joyned their several Notes to mix up a dreadful peal of Noises.”

These were scenes that did little for the dignity of the cloth. The clerical participants report it all with undiminished good faith: they believe that ‘Richard’ (as Jollie persists in calling him even at this point) cannot see them, with his eyes rolled back in his head, but although everyone struggles to protect the leading minister, he is still bespattered with diabolic accuracy:

“Upon which the Demoniack most furiously raged, threatened to tear him in pieces, struggled most vehemently to get at him, being Six or Seven Yards distant from him, hurled Rolls of Foam still on his Face; and tho' Hats and Aprons were held up betwixt them, to hinder his annoying of him, yet he was hurled so high, or so low, or sideways, that the Balls of Foam which came from him still hit him on or about the Face; notwithstanding the uselessness of Richard’s seeing or speaking Organs herein.”

It’s hard not to think that, locally, there was enough knowledge of the type of tricks Dugdale had played at school (in which he would take a subversive delight in involving a schoolteacher mystified at his freakish antics) for some observers to have been half in on the joke. There is also that barely concealed Lancashire Catholicism: how many were taking great pleasure in watching Richard insult Protestant clerics, and getting away with it splendidly? Meanwhile, after scenes like this, the local population, gathered together in unusual numbers, swived merrily away in the hedge-bottoms.

The Surey demoniac is not mentioned in Marion Gibson, or Dijkhuizen, the pamphlets are not in Philip Almond’s anthology of such texts. It’s very late 17^th century, but Zachary Taylor is aware of exorcism cases in Lancashire running through the entire century, as Catholic priests and Jesuits sought to make conversions in a county that was only superficially Protestant. I have noted before very late witchcraft pamphlets as unduly neglected, here’s a case of possession which was very fully investigated by the astute Zachary Taylor, it’s amusing – and it’s illustrated.

Wench and witch at Greenwich, 1650

The strange witch at Greenwich by the pseudonymous Hieronymus Magomastix (1650) is one of those strange performances that only the mid 17^th century could produce. It was written by an elderly clergyman, who does reveal that he was incumbent at St Brides in Fleet Street. It ought to be possible to find out his identity, which would have scarcely been hidden when the pamphlet came out. He preferred, though, to appear in print veiled as a ‘Magomastix’, a scourge for the wizards.

The pamphlet is cast as a dialogue between ‘Scepticus’, and ‘Veridicus’, the author figure and, as his name implies, a veridical speaker of truth. ‘Scepticus’ is misnamed, he’s a sceptic as far as the 17^th century tolerated them: so eager to be instructed in matters of which he confesses ignorance that he kicks off the dialogue with effusive flattery of his interlocutor, confessing that “I was tossed and troubled in unsettled fluctuations” until he “lighted my darke torch at your bright flame” and asks for more, “knowing you are as willing to improve your able parts for publick and private good to the inlivening and inlightening of such weak tenuities as mine, as a full dugd Mother or Nurse to communicate her milke to a hungry childe…” In justice to the self-tickling author, this is all meant to be ‘jocoserious’, and the author uses the term twice so that we understand his tone throughout.

This ‘Scepticus’, so eager to be spiritually enlightened, has a question: ‘that you would be pleased to informe mee both in the quid, quale & quomodo, of the Reports in every mans tongue … of a strange witch or Ghost now at Greenwich haunting the house of one Meriday, and playing strange prankes by throwing stones at the glasse windowes, making the stooles, chaires, and other utensils daunce Sellengers round … throwing also Bookes, yea the Testament into the fire, as though it cared as little for it, as a new Enthusiast, Papist, or an Atheist, peerking the ladle out of the Wives boyling pot below, as high as into the Husbands bed above…” (This is a sample of the ‘jocoserious’ style employed.)

So, here’s our situation: poltergeist activity in a house in Greenwich in 1650. The full title of the pamphlet fills us in on what set it all off:

The strange vvitch at Greenvvich, (ghost, spirit, or hobgoblin) haunting a wench, late servant to a miser, suspected a murtherer of his late vvife: with curious discussions of walking spirits and spectars of dead men departed, for rare and mysticall knowledge and discourse, / by Hieronymus Magomastix. April 24. 1650.

After the death of her mistress, a 14 year old ‘wench’ (who I deduce was living back at the house of a relative by marriage named Meriday) embarked on confecting the ‘supernatural’ occurrences which would suggest that the recent death had not been natural, that her mistress’ unquiet spirit haunted the house, having something to impart. She did this with such success that numbers of people spent time in the house, to experience for themselves the phenomena (and, so suggestible are people in such matters, they inevitably did). The dead woman’s body was exhumed, probably because the girl’s clever and determined campaign suggested that something had to be amiss, and be worth investigation (though one rather doubts that 17^th century forensics would determine much). The girl’s motive may have been indignant loyalty to her deceased mistress, but money may also have played a part if the widower had been miserly in paying her off.

The clergyman writing the pamphlet had established the basic facts of what was going on. The girl had not proved easy to break down, but he finally elicited a confession (of sorts) from her:

(Scepticus) “Proceed in your plaine story of this house haunted by Witches: I have heard of most of these pageants you have related were onely done by the wily Wench, who was servant to the woman taken out of her grave, upon suspicion of her unnatural death: and that she hath troubled and blundered the Waters, and made all this poother, to call her late master in question about the death of his Wife.

(Veridicus) It’s very true, that a bold faced brazen brow’d wench hath had a great finger in the Pye, and hath been a great stickler [i.e., instigator] in these Pageants; for I have had her in serious examination, and have with much adoe wrested from her thus much…”

You’d think this was enough, but while ‘Magomastix’ may be keen to scourge spurious wizards, like the demonologists in Walter Stephens’ Demon Lovers, he cannot bring himself to rationalize away completely such gratifying local evidence of the supernatural. Magomastix’s whole pamphlet is a carefully Protestant picking-and-choosing of what you must, and must not believe.

The manifestations were too important to him (he had his own experiences of them while round at the ‘haunted’ house), and he has the testimonies of other “solid witnesses” as well, who were utterly convinced by aspects of what they had seen in the house. His own chief experience (naturally enough) had happened just when his back was turned. The girl obviously was willing to go to extremes with a clergyman whose investigations were proving awkward:

“I my selfe being one night with much company in the house, as wee went out a round stone was throwne at my daughters heeles; another time as I was in the house with the old Wife and two children, as I went into the garden a knife was throwne after me, which I tooke up, and with vehemency threw it back againe to the very place from whence it came, daring the Witch or Spirit to throw it at mee againe, and conjuring it in the name of that Jesus which is terrible to Divells to speake unto mee, and to reveale the reason why it haunted the house and to return to it own place; but I had no reply.”

The decision he has reached is that while the girl may have confessed to imposture, she cannot have perpetrated all the poltergeist activities. Did she have an accomplice?

Scepticus puts some of the local guesswork to his instructor: “Some have great jealousie of the old Wife her Mother in Law” (he means, they suspected that she had) “a great hand … in these witchly or spiritly postures, as though by some explicite or implicite compact with Sathan, shee should delude the world by these fascinations … What think you of her?” But Veridicus exonerates the older woman: “I have no windows into her heart, and for her outward carriage it is so candid, square and faire, that I see no cause either in reason or Religion to suspect her”. The older woman was, he found, “So strong in faith, so frequent and fervent in prayer, so zealous in her devotions.”

So Scepticus draws the obvious conclusion: “Its probable the Wench acts all her self.” But here Veridicus sticks: “Something shee doth, but not all”. His position is nicely poised (and maybe the ‘jocoserious’ nature of his pamphlet indicates a certain anxiety to manage the flow of more genuinely sceptical derision). He is nevertheless, like the Protestant thinkers in Greenblatt’s Hamlet and Purgatory, determined to refute the idea that ghosts can walk:

“I assure you, what ever the Pontificans [he means the Catholics] doate or faigne, or our Vulgars dreame of the Ghosts or Spirits of this man, or that man walking after their deaths in this or that shape, is a very lye, an assured lye; take this from me, yea, from Scripture, Fathers, Reason, and Experience assuredly…that these walking, or talking spectars in humane shapes, are such men and women really as have been dead and buried; this is not only a fixion unprobable, but impossible, for these reasons …”

He goes on to explain that the souls of the dead saints are in the hands of God, they departed in peace and so cannot be perturbed in such hauntings, they are in paradise with the good thief, while “the wicked are closed in Hell … out of which there is no jayle delivery”. His view can be summed up when he says that the departed godly would not return to earth, the wicked cannot.

Denying that ‘apparitions’ are the souls of the dead, Veridicus does not deny all visions, and a lengthy list of them follows, including mention of those that afflicted Richard III, “which instances doe not onely confute and confound the ancient Saduces” but they also “muzzle the mouth of Atheisticall Politicians” who “hold that there be no reall or substantial Divells, but onely the Furies and Erinnis of wicked consciences”.

Veridicus may have eliminated ghosts, but he is determined to preserve and evidence the ‘substantial’ devil. Though at one point of his pamphlet, in scoffing at Catholic exorcisms, Veridicus asserts that “Even Sathan himselfe, is chained as a Mastiffe, and grated as a Lyon, In all his powers subordinate unto God”, he is unable to resist the notion of a ‘reall’ Satan busily prompting people in this world. Here again, in those exorcisms, one senses another reassuring evidence for the existence of the spirit world that Protestants were having to do without, obliging them to adhere more stubbornly to a belief in witchcraft, the witches as Satan’s visible agents testifying to his existence. The ‘wench’ had admitted to this tale of how “Satan entered into her as into Judas and Ananias”:

“that being one day in her mothers garden, some three weeks after her Dames death, that a stone was throwne at her, and hit her on the back, none being near her, nor within her sight; at which she much marveling from whence it should come, she tooke up the stone, looked seriously upon it, carried it up and downe the garden, with as much pride and complacency, as admiration: upon which Satan vehemently tempted her to throw it against her mothers window, which this obedient vassal did accordingly. Upon which she setting the devil a worke, as he her, as she broke the ice, an ill spirit hath waded and thrown forty stones since (as forty can testify) at the same windows, no visible hand being since.

Without much wresting and sponging shee hath freely and penitentially acknowledged both to my selfe and others, that since that stone throwne in the Garden, shee her selfe in a paltry pride to aggravate the Report of spirit haunting behind peoples backs, when she thought shee was free from being seene, hath often in acting and counterfeiting the spirit, throwne stooles, cushions, candlesticks, dishes, and kept the like Revill Rush [?]; and indeed so long goes the Pitcher to the Well, that at last it comes home broake. Sathan catcht her in her owne snare, being by a yong man taken tripping in the very act, as shee cast a great chip out of a chamber downe the staires into the house where many people were.”

Here we see a danger beyond the ignominy of simple exposure in what the girl was doing: while the pamphlet can talk quite jovially a mixture of “ingenious folly and serpentine knavery” in her actions, Magomastix cannot quite let go of the devil, who was “Baiting his hooke with many delusive promises, that if shee would go on as shee had begun, what shee did should never bee knowne, and that hee would never forsake her. I see give the Divell an inch, and hee will take an ell, sup of his broth, and eate of his roast-meate.” Her situation was that of a witch, promised things by the devil, assisted in certain acts: even her involuntary self-exposure could be read as Satan betraying her!

Satan had to be involved: the manifestations in the house were beyond her powers, too well witnessed. ‘Magomastix’ produces this rather astonishing comment, in which a whole gamut of metaphysical experiences are linked as inexplicable but true perceptions: “Stooles, sticks in the fire, laundry irons … have moved of themselves … they looking on, and seeing nothing move them more than they see, a voice, a sound, a wind, a noise, a soule in man, or their owne hearts, which they perceive really, though they see nothing visibly.”

The conclusion both parties in the dialogue are drawn to is that witchcraft has to be involved, that there must be a witch, whose familiar spirit is invisibly assisting:

Scepticus: “I have strong jealousie that this Impe hath a laire-father or laire-mother (besides Sathan the father of all impostures) some hee or shee witch, who traines her (besides these legerdemains) even in Witchcraft it selfe.”

Veridicus shares this suspicion:
“Yea, I have dealt by all ways and meanes with the Wench both faire and foule, menaces, threatening, and promises to reveale her magicall Tutresse; but shee is a subtile as a yong serpent, I can get no more out of her then water out of a stone.”

The ‘wench’ might be getting the assistance of a witch, and then the next possibility, as mentioned, was that the ‘wench’ might herself be a witch. Some tricks she could pull off by her own dexterity, the other more confounding ones through a spirit she commanded. Veridicus first produces ominous Bible examples of “yong things” and their “strong soone budding corruptions” (citing Matthew 27 and Herodias). Then he jumps to the more recent past: “Many yong wily Wenches in our Times, some discovered by Doctour Harsnet, some by Deakon and Walker, in their printed Dialoguizings, and some by deepe and judicious King James, to have playd strange reakes [the word means pranks] by the tutoring and impostures of Fryars and Jesuits, and by the trainings of some old Witches and Wizzards both black and white; and indeed I thinke an English rack, or Spanish strappado would no more get it out of her… unlesse we could discover her, as now the Scotch Witches by water Ordeall.”

Torturing her to get at the truth isn’t exactly unthinkable to him, though he pushes the thought off into Scotland.

Towards the end of the pamphlet, Veridicus, who clearly thinks very well of himself, apparently forgets what he has argued earlier, when he boastfully suggests that most of the things reported of the great conjurers he could do himself, if he took on the art of ‘meer natural magick’. Indeed, he further boasts, he could do these things, and then impart the capacity to a six year old, whose innocence would be a testimony to just how undiabolical such magic was (while the common people would think he was a great conjurer). The man who was, just pages before, half willing to put the 14 year old ‘wench’ to the question about the sources of her witchcraft, asserts that he could produce all kinds of magical phenomena legitimately if he set his capacious mind to the art; the man who condemned Jesuits and Friars for tutoring ‘young wily wenches’ imagines doing just that himself:

“I perswade my self I could do such things my self … by this meer naturall magick , or in plain tearmes, the producing of Art and nature into practice; such rare and exquisite things have been done, or may be done, especially by such instruments … That the common people .. would take me for as great a conjurer as ever Cornelius Agrippa, or Doctor Faustus, or for as great a witch as Circes, or Medea; at least as great a Juggler as once my neighbour John a Ley, or Hocus Pocus, or some cunning wise man, such as Mr Lilly is divulged, as though he were a second Merlin; when for all this, I could make a child of six years old do the like things presently and give as good a reason of what I do (as I perswade my self Mr Booker, and Mr Lilly can give of their artificiall undiabolized Predictions) as I can give a Reason why I am hot or warm, when I am in the Sun, or at the fire without any more confederacy with any Witch, or spirit.”

The Strange Witch at Greenwich involves what is ultimately an uneasy consideration of things that look like something else. An apparition is not a dead person, but a devil (inevitably, the two discuss the case of the Bible’s Witch of Endor, Veridicus asserting that what she produced was “a deluding Malignant spirit in the shape of Samuel”). Supernatural soliciting may be misleading: Veridicus tells a story that “a counterfeit voice” told “the late Mr Crashaw of the Temple, or old Muncy Duncy of St Johns in Cambridge, that they should goe to Geneva to preach the Gospell”. He disapproves, of course, as they must have left the Church of England to become Calvinists. But after we have worked through a learned list of early modern celebrity look-alikes, we hear something else about the deluded Mr Crashaw: our writer was often mistaken for him: “I have been often in the streets tooke for Mr Crashaw, when he was preacher at the Temple, and I at Saint Brides in Fleet Street.”

When he had the knife thrown at him by the diabolic spirit operating at Meriday’s house, did Veridicus attempt no exorcism (asks Scepticus)? No, says Veridicus firmly, exorcism is one of the ‘disorderly Orders’ of the Catholic church. But he admits that he did ‘adjure’ the spirit when it threw a knife at him, but “my act was so far discrepant from the practice of the Popish Priests”.

As we have heard, if he chose to take up natural magic, “the common people ... would take me for as great a conjurer as ever Cornelius Agrippa, or Doctor Faustus”. In a way, the ‘strange witch at Greenwich’ was Hieronimus Magomastix. His inflated pseudonym anticipates his final boast of how he could become a conjurer: if you set aside its etymology, it’s a conjurer’s name. He is trying to rule what must and what can’t be believed in (devils but not at any price ghosts, who are all devils), but as he tries to impose his opinions, his own unsettled nature is revealed. He is jocose, he is serious. He produces a list of pretenders, including Martin Guerre “long admitted for a husband though a counterfeit knave”; he could, like a Jesuit exorcist, instruct a wily six year old; his own lookalike became a Calvinist; we see that while he is Veridicus, he is also latently Scepticus, the real sceptic for whom “a sound, a wind, a noise, a soule in man” are all the same, clinging on to the ‘substantial’ devil in the absence of exorcisms and ghosts, while asserting, like Balthasar Bekker would do, that the devil is imprisoned in hell.

Around him swirls a chaos of inappropriate beliefs: (that) “it is the Ghost or Spirit of the dead woman her late Dame which walkes, as I assure you many in the Towne, and most in the Countrey ere she was tooke out of her Grave, did believe as their Creed verily and assuredly” (and I do like the smart distinction of town and country there.) He invents people asking him what to believe, who are notably ready to believe in him, yet his pamphlet ends with what seems to be an elaborate trailer for a long and systematic account of Satan’s true powers, but while boasting that he could deliver it, he says it’s too large a burden for his “aged shoulders”. He will set Scepticus to rights in the afternoon, for now, his stomach is summoning him off to his midday meal. And off he shuffles, offering no useful final advice on what to do about the ‘wench’, his present ‘rare and mysticall’ discourse about Satan and witchcraft merely ‘jocoserious’, stretched to a fraction of the length that any self-respecting 17^th century clergyman writer would run to on such a subject (though promising more after lunch).

In the final assessment, he just blogged about it, didn’t he?

Exorcisms and conjuring tricks: Lancashire, c.1650

Seventeenth century Lancashire seems to have been regarded as a reliable source of supernatural follies. Ben Jonson has Satan tell the naïve devil Pug (in The Devil is an Ass) that he might cope adequately with being the diabolic familiar of some Lancashire witch, but street-wise London is out of the question.

I have been looking at Zachary Taylor’s The devil turn'd casuist, or, The cheats of Rome laid open (1696), obviously a late 17^th century text, but it contains an anecdote dated back by the author to the mid-century. It concerns that time-honoured device for high-pressure proselytizing, an exorcism. The Catholic priest conducting the exorcism wanted to put on a good show, and seems to have been willing to help things along a little: it came down to a conjuring trick, with misdirection of the audience, and an accomplice.

Who bungled it:

“Between 30 and 40 years ago I am told there was another Exorcism as this, in the same place, for it is a Nest of Papists. And when the Devil was to go out, he said he would have a living soul with him, which frighted the poor People sadly, and made them Sweat and Sigh, not knowing whom he would have. But the Priest manfully withstood him, and would not suffer him to touch any Soul there. This was a little comfort to them. Then the Devil would have some other living Creature, a Cock or Hen, &. But the Priest thought that too good a Morsel for the Devil, and would not allow it him. In short the Priest would allow him nothing but three broken pieces of a Tobaco-pipe, which he laid upon a Trencher on the Table, and when he went, he was to take them, as a sign of his Departure. When the minute was at hand, the Priest makes a bustle, and cries out now He comes, He comes, He comes, &c. and by this means (which is right Leger-de-main) calls the People’s eyes from off the Trencher to the Demoniack, and an hand came behind over the Table, and catch’d at the pieces of the Pipe, but unluckily got but two, the third slipping off the Trencher, which a Protestant took up. And when the Priest told them that they might know by what they saw that the Devil was gone out. Yes saith the Protestant perhaps he is, but he is better than his word, for he hath left one piece of his pipe behind him, and here it is. This I had from a neighbouring Clergy-man, who is rector of the Parish where the person lived that took up the Pipe, and who had it from his own Mouth.”

The set-up here was to have the fragments of pipe stem seem to have disappeared as evidence of the departure of the exorcised devil. There’s a parallel in the exorcisms reported from 1696. The demoniac is named as Thomas Ashton, a weaver from the parish of Wigan. In his case, the signal of the devil’s departure was that one of the diamond-shaped panes of glass (a ‘quarrel’) in the window would vanish. But the exorcists realise that they have too much attention fixed on the window from the very people they want to convert, the local Protestants. Nor do they seem to have a notion of misdirecting attention at the crucial instant, so they abandon the plan:

“All the People, especially the Protestants cast their eyes upon the Window, and the Quarrel out of which he was to go, and take it with him. But whether the peoples eyes being fixt upon the Quarrel might make them apprehensive, that they would discover the Trick by discerning how the quarrel was conveyed away (for the priests Elbows were often very near it: but whether it was this or something else I know not; but neither the Devil nor the quarrel went.”

This particular exorcism did not run smoothly: the weaver Ashton had been primed with some Latin, but the attempted impressive execration of the devil in the learned tongue faltered when the priest himself forgot the Latin for a toad, and had to be prompted by a spectator, while another Protestant observer, getting drawn in, enthusiastically joined in with speaking to the devil in Latin: he wanted to see the devil’s tongue (actually blackened either by dye or thumb pressure, says Taylor), and cried out ‘Verte ad me’, ‘Turn towards me!’, which Ashton did not understand, and ignored.

The pamphlet runs together various follies of this kind. In this final story, a Mrs Ditchfield is the target for conversion, and the fake demoniac is a maid servant called Alice Pennington, a convert and a willing (if rather giggly and transparent) accomplice. A ‘good understanding Protestant’, William Smith, sets about demonstrating that what seems wonderful in the possessed maid is less remarkable when performed with equal aptitude by himself:

“in a little time they gained upon her (Mrs Ditchfield), and she began to tell Mr Smith of the virtue of the Holy-Water, and what strange effects it wrought on the Demoniack, of which she could desire that he might be a witness; and so to the Maid they went, and she sprinkled Holy-Water in her face, and the Maid spit at her, Oh (saith she) do not you see what a strange power is in the Holy-Water? Yes (saith Mr. Smith) and pray will you try it upon me; and with some persuasions she was prevail’d with to make the Experiment on him, and she flung Holy-Water on his face, and he spit in her face; and she flung again, and he spit again, what do you mean saith she; O what Strange power saith he, is there in this Holy-Water, but Dear Mrs, saith he, do you not plainly see that all this is only to delude and abuse you, I am heartily sorry for you; she made him no reply, for they had now prevail’d upon her.”

(Image from Histoires prodigieuses et memorables, 1598)