The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England (WOMEN IN HISTORY)

by Fraser, Antonia

  Joan Willimot, herself a widow, like Mother Flower, testified to the latter’s boast that though she could not have her will of the Earl of Rutland ‘she had spied my lord’s son and stricken him to the earth with a white spirit’. Spitting on some earth and working it with her fingers, she announced herself well satisfied that ‘though she could not hurt the Lord himself, yet she had sped his son’. Margaret Flower supplied further details as to how her mother had carried all this out. Mother Flower had asked her daughter to procure a glove belonging to the young Lord Roos, and Margaret had duly picked one up which she found lying ‘on the Rushes in the Nursery’. Mother Flower then first used the glove to stroke her cat Rutterkin, then dipped the glove in hot water, ‘pricked it often’ and within a week, lo and behold Henry Lord Roos was ‘tormented’.

  The glove of Francis Lord Roos was discovered by Margaret Flower on a dung-hill; she brought it to her mother where it received similar treatment of immersion in hot water and rubbing on the belly of Rutterkin. However in the case of Francis, because the boy, although sickly, was still alive in 1619, it was stated that Mother Flower had merely threatened him ‘a Mischief’ and had predicted (inaccurately as it turned out) that he would mend again.

  A piece of handkerchief belonging to Lady Catherine Manners was similarly applied to the belly of Rutterkin, at which point the cat was ordered to ‘fly and go’. According to Margaret Flower, Rutterkin merely replied with the word ‘Mew’ and did not either fly or go; however, this refusal was somehow interpreted as evidence that even her familiar did not have power over a witch like Mother Flower. The lewd Philippa Flower confirmed her sister’s confession concerning the glove and its treatment; ultimately her mother had buried it ‘Wishing the owner might never thrive’. Philippa also contributed that her mother frequently cursed both the Earl and Countess of Rutland, boiling ‘feathers and blood together, using devilish speeches and strange gestures’.

  We do not have to accept the wilder statements of Margaret and Philippa Flower in order to suppose that Mother Flower had not only threatened to be revenged on the Earl of Rutland, but had actually indulged in some form of witchcraft to do so. Nor was her successful form of vengeance intended to be kept secret. Anne Baker had been told three years earlier by ‘two wives of Belvoir’ concerning the death of Lord Roos that a glove had been buried and as it ‘rotted and wasted, so did the liver of the lord’. Writing towards the end of the eighteenth century, when descendants of the deponents were still living, John Nichols in his History and Antiquities of the County of Leicester wrote that there was ‘no doubt of their intentional guilt … In short they believed themselves to be witches.’25 For a malevolent old woman, ranged as she saw it against the powerful Rutland family interest, witchcraft represented not so much one possible form of revenge as the only possible form. The coincidental (as we must believe) sickenings and deaths of the Manners children represented therefore at once Mother Flower’s triumph and her downfall.

  After the Leicestershire accusations against the Flowers had been heard, the family were fetched by the Justices of the Peace, who bound them over to appear at the Assizes at Lincoln. Margaret and Philippa reached Lincoln, but Mother Flower died suddenly en route and was buried at Ancaster. Even the manner of her death was appropriate to one whose ‘whole course of life gave grave suspicion that she was a notorious witch’. It was remembered that Mother Flower had predicted that she would be ‘neither hanged nor burnt’. This time her prediction was certainly successful although there is no evidence that she had additionally foreseen the precise manner of her death. This came about as Mother Flower was eating a piece of bread and butter. She called on the morsel to choke her if she was guilty of being a witch. She was and it did.26

  The Flower sisters were less fortunate. A series of Tudor statutes against witchcraft had culminated in the toughest one of all at the beginning of the new reign. By the Act of 1604 it was no longer necessary to have actually caused the death of a person by the use of witchcraft, the mere practice of it if proved was sufficient to ensure guilt. This law, which was not repealed until 1736, also made any form of consultation with or feeding of an evil spirit a felony; so much for Rutterkin and his kind, the kitten called Puss, the mole called Hiffe and so forth and so on, an endless stream of evil spirits masquerading as domestic animals who were undeniably being harboured by their mistresses. By this standard, Philippa Flower too, like her mother, was probably guilty of practising witchcraft – in her case to cause Thomas Simpson to love her; Margaret by her own account had supplied the fatal gloves belonging to Lord Rutland’s sons.

  Margaret’s confessions in general sounded that pathetic note of hysterical delusion which marks so much of the evidence at the witch trials.27 She admitted that she had two familiar spirits ‘sucking on her’, one white, the other black and spotted. The white spirit sucked under her left breast, and its black-spotted fellow ‘within inward parts of her secrets’; they had agreed to carry out all her wishes in return for the promise of her soul. While Margaret was in gaol at Lincoln, four other devils also appeared to her, one of whom had a black head like an ape; unfortunately Margaret could not recall anything about their encounter except that she had been angry that the devil had not been ‘plainer’ in the manner of his speaking. The other three took the forms of Rutterkin, ‘little Robin’ and another spirit.

  Philippa Flower too bore witness to the existence of a white rat sucking at her own left breast – in fact a spirit – for three or four years, to which she had promised her soul if it would cause Thomas Simpson to love her. And Philippa confirmed that Rutterkin, now recognized for what he was, a devil in disguise, had persistently bitten and sucked at her sister’s neck over the years.

  In March 1619 the two daughters of Mother Flower were executed at Lincoln ‘to the terror of all beholders’. The Earl of Rutland, hearing them cry out against the devil ‘for deluding them’ and now breaking his promise of assistance ‘When they stood most in need of his Help’, no longer felt any difficulty in believing in their ‘Wickedness and horrible Contracts’.28 A year later when their sickly son Francis died in his turn, the Earl and Countess, now left without male heirs, must have felt themselves still further convinced that justice had been done.

  We can follow the rest of the sad story in the Rutland family accounts. In 1619 £20 had been given to Mr Jephson for prosecuting the witches at Lincoln, and another £20 had been spent on ‘my Lord’s journey to the Assizes’. With the death of Francis in March 1620 £26 was the total sum incurred for breaking the ground for his burial, and payments to the chanter, the Dean, choristers, vergers, grave-makers, as well as eight dozen torches and sufficient frankincense. The coffin itself cost 10s. In July payments were noted relating to a journey by ‘my lady’ to take the waters at Tunbridge Wells. She went ‘for Barrenness’, the waters there being celebrated for relieving that unhappy condition.29 The cure did not work. It turned out to be one of Mother Flower’s less successful predictions that after a long while the Earl and Countess ‘should have more children’. No more children were in fact born to the stricken Rutlands.

  This absence of male heirs did, however, have the unlooked-for effect of improving the fortunes of the Earl’s daughter by his first wife, Lady Catherine Manners. About the time the Flower sisters were being put to death at Lincoln, Lady Catherine, already an heiress from her own mother’s property, had found herself courted by the most glittering figure of the age, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. It has been suggested that Buckingham sought Catherine as much for the satisfaction of her Manners connection – the Villiers had once been minor gentry in the area dominated by the Manners family – as for her money;30 ‘that puir fool Kate’, as she was dubbed by King James I, was certainly not pretty.

  At first the match hung fire; despite her love for Buckingham, Catherine, who was a Catholic, declined to change her religion, while ‘the mother Countesses’, that is the Countess of Rutland and Buckingham’s baleful mother, the former
Lady Compton, now created Countess of Buckingham in her own right, quarrelled. But the death of Francis transformed Catherine from a considerable into a magnificent heiress; Buckingham was now far more likely to receive the vast dowry he was said to be asking for ‘the sister’ – £20,000 ready money and land worth £4,000 a year, the latter figure to be doubled if Lord Roos died.31 At last in May 1620 Buckingham succeeded in marrying the ‘puir fool’, who bestowed upon him not only her heart but a fortune hugely augmented by her brothers’ deaths.

  The transformation of the daughter of the Earl of Rutland into the Duchess of Buckingham, wife of the King’s splendid favourite, cannot have been what Mother Flower intended to bring about with her spells and curses.

  ‘[I] could see nothing in the evidence which did persuade me to think them other than poor, melancholy, envious, mischievous, ill-disposed, ill-dieted, atrabilious [that is, black-biled] constitutions’ – so wrote the historian Arthur Wilson charitably, and doubtlessly accurately, of the Chelmsford witches at their trial in 1645.32 For if Mother Flower had a genuine grudge against the Earl of Rutland and tried to practise some kind of vengeance, there were many old women throughout the seventeenth century who suffered simply because they corresponded to the stereotype of the witch.

  In many ways it was a circular argument. Whatever the present disagreements about the precise nature of seventeenth-century witchcraft, it is at least common ground that the vast majority of witches actually tried were both female and old (with widows at a special risk).33 Contemporaries were well aware of the fact. King James I put the proportion of females to males at 20 to 1 and Alexander Roberts put it at 100 to 1. In his pamphlet of 1648, John Stearne, a close associate of the witch-hunter Matthew Hopkins, wrote that it was ‘evident’ that of witches in general ‘there be commonly more women than men … especially of the hurting witches’. Reginald Scot had connected witchcraft with the menopause, a phenomenon peculiar to the female, when women suffered delusions because of ‘the stopping of their monthly melancholic flux’. Witches were also believed for the most part to live ‘in most base esteem and beggary’, a supposition also borne out by the figures available.34 Thus was the stereotype constructed in both literature and public opinion.

  This meant that while some younger women and a few men were certainly tried for or suspected of practising witchcraft, they were considered as individuals; the species to which they belonged was not of itself under suspicion. (Pregnancy incidentally saved a woman from being hanged, at least for the time being; a woman who was not pregnant would sometimes plead so in order to save herself – a claim which would be investigated by the local midwives.) But because the agreed characteristics of a witch were those of an old woman, any old woman might be suspected of being a witch owing to characteristics over which she had no control. Another witness to the witch-hunting forays which produced the Chelmsford trials wrote that suspicion fell on ‘every old woman with a wrinkled face, a furred brow, a hairy lip, a squint eye, a squeaking voice, or a scolding tongue, a skull cap on her head, a spindle in her hand, a Dog or Cat by her side.’35

  The Bideford witches – three crazed old women who were put to death in the West Country in 1682 – provide tragic examples of persons who were probably guilty of little except advancing age, destitution and wandering wits. Temperance Lloyd, a widow, Susanna Edwards, a widow, and Mary Trembles, a single woman, were tried at the Devon Summer Sessions in front of Sir Francis North, the Lord Chief Justice, and Sir Thomas Raymond. North described them later: they were, he wrote, ‘the most old, decrepid [sic] despicable, miserable creatures that ever he saw. A painter would have chosen them out of the whole country for figures of that kind to have drawn by.’ They were in fact damned by their own confessions, which as North pointed out, exceeded even the testimonies brought against them, which of themselves were ‘very full and fanciful’.36

  Certainly there was much which was ‘fanciful’ about the evidence produced against the three women.37 Temperance Lloyd was subjected to a crude physical examination. This was a routine procedure for a suspected witch, in order to discover either the devil’s mark – which could be pricked without pain – or some form of teat – which could suckle a familiar (described as ‘a common token to know all witches by’). Mrs Anne Wakeley, wife of a Bideford husband, headed the body of women who found in Temperance Lloyd’s ‘secret parts’ two teats ‘hanging right together like unto a piece of flesh that a child had sucked. And that each of the teats was about an inch in length.’ Temperance Lloyd herself confessed that a ‘Black man’ sometimes in the shape of a magpie, had sucked at them. The devil had also helped her to disguise herself as a ‘grey or braget’ (honey-coloured) cat, in order to deposit a child’s puppet in the chamber of one Grace Thomas to whom she wished to do harm.

  Anne Wakeley testified that while nursing Grace Thomas, ‘something in the shape of a magpie’ had come into her chamber. Grace Thomas contributed that Temperance Lloyd had fallen on her knees and wept in Bideford High Street allegedly for joy at seeing her, Grace, ‘so strong again’; however, that night clearly as a direct result of the encounter, Grace Thomas had been overcome by agonizing pricking pains from head to foot. Significantly, in her opinion, Grace Thomas recovered once Temperance Lloyd had been hauled off to prison.

  The old woman further testified that she had disguised herself ‘in the form of a red pig’ to bewitch one Lydia Burman who had given evidence against her in another trial (Temperance was however acquitted on this particular charge). Some of Temperance’s revelations cast a pathetic light on the nature of her daily round. The devil, she said on the eve of her death, had appeared to her while she was fetching some brooms: ‘This poor woman has a great burthen’, he exclaimed, offering to ease her of it. But Temperance refused the devil’s offer: ‘I said The Lord had enabled me to carry it so far, and I hope I shall be able to carry it further.’ Sometimes she revealed an understandable sense of grievance: ‘I sold apples, and the child took an apple from me, and the mother took the apple from the child; for the which I was very angry.’ But, added Temperance piteously, the child itself died of smallpox, not witchcraft.

  Another routine test of a witch was to compel her to recite the Lord’s Prayer or the Creed; a test incidentally that a confused and illiterate old woman was all too likely to fail. Failures of memory, stumblings or mumblings indicated the devil at work. Old Temperance recited both the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed most imperfectly.

  As for Susanna Edwards, she recounted how she had met the devil about two years ago ‘in the Parsonage Close’ in the shape of a fine gentleman ‘apparelled in black’. Hoping to get some money from him, Susanna curtseyed. The devil, discovering from her what he was apparently not sufficiently omniscient to know, that Susanna was very poor, promised her that she would not want for meat, drink or clothes in future if she placed herself in his power; after this encounter, the devil – ‘something in the shape of a little boy’ – sucked at her breast. Then it was Mary Trembles’s turn: she confessed that she had been persuaded by Susanna Edwards to follow her into mischief. She had then had carnal knowledge with the devil in the shape of a lion: he had sucked her ‘and caused her to cry out with pain’.

  In the end Susanna Edwards was convicted of bewitching one Grace, wife of John Barnes, and Mary Trembles of bewitching a mariner’s wife called Dorcas Coleman, whose violent internal pains her doctor had been quick to ascribe to witchcraft. Both these women incidentally were alive and healthy at the time of the trial, so the witchcraft had evidently done little permanent damage. The reason Susanna and Mary gave for ‘tormenting’ Grace Barnes was a significant one: it was to punish her for having refused them ‘meat and tobacco’ when they begged for it. Like Temperance’s fury with the child and its mother who robbed her of payment of her apple, these admissions were evidence of the kind of low-level village grudge which must have existed in multitudes. It was when a child died, a woman rolled in agony and the slighted person corresponded to the black-bil
ed – ‘atrabilious’– stereotype of a witch, that the hue and cry of prejudice frequently followed.

  A pamphlet printed shortly after the deaths of the three old women (which accused them amongst other things of sneezing a woman to death and causing a boy out at sea to fall to his doom from the main mast of his ship) gives the following account of the execution scene.38

  Old Temperance Lloyd went on her last journey from the prison quite unconcerned, ‘eating all the way’. She does not even seem to have comprehended the danger she was in. Mary Trembles, on the other hand, ‘lay down’ and had to be tied on to the back of a horse before she could be moved.

  Just before the hangman did his work, the Rev. Mr Hann, a local clergyman, subjected the three women to one last cross-questioning on the subject of their diabolical past. Mary Trembles protested her innocence. While admitting that she had seen the devil once (although no longer quite sure of his shape – ‘looking, I think, like a lion’) she denied what had been sworn at the Grand Inquest, that she had ‘a teat in her privy parts’, and denied too that she had had carnal knowledge of the devil.

  In so far as Temperance Lloyd had any understanding of what was happening to her, she seems to have made a last ditch attempt to blame Susanna Edwards:

  MR HANN: ‘You say you never hurt ships nor boats: did you ever ride over an arm of the sea on a cow?’