Six Women of Salem

by Marilynne K. Roach

  And they did—vigorously.

  Philip English probably returned to Salem in January to face the grand jury, though this is not entirely clear. On March 2, 1693, he penned a letter to Governor Phips (his “great enemy”), demanding his confiscated goods be returned. Phips ordered Sheriff Corwin to make an inventory of all that was taken, but by April 26 this task had not yet been done, so Phips sent another strongly worded letter.

  If Mary English returned with her husband, she could at least visit her daughters in Boston: Susanna staying with the Aldens, Mary with the Hollard family, who had concealed her father before his arrest. The mansion, by family tradition, would hardly have been ready for them right away, for the law and covetous locals had stripped the place. Some neighbors may have salvaged items to keep safe and then return; others were merely light-fingered. According to family lore even the family portraits were gone.

  Philip’s warehouses were empty, his livestock driven away to be sold or consumed, and his ships impounded unless they had been at sea and the crew warned to steer clear from home port. “My Estate was Seised & Squandred away to a great Value & much of my provision used to Subsist the numerous Company of prisoners.” He was sure the bobtailed cow in Sheriff Corwin’s yard was his bobtailed cow. He set about seeing to repairs and itemizing his losses: lumber and hardware, textiles and molasses, cod and cordage from the warehouses, even the three gross of thimbles from the shop in the house. In addition, he had spent a good £50 for proper room and board in Boston and put up a bond of £1,400 to be allowed some freedom of movement there. That bond was forfeit upon his escape, but he wanted it back along with all of his property—all of it!

  Meanwhile, Edward Bishop, widowed by Bridget’s execution and evidently still living in the house he had built on the Oliver property, remarried March 9, 1693, to widow Elizabeth Cash of Beverly.

  The Superior Court convened in Boston on April 25 for Suffolk County. Stoughton presided once again with Justices Thomas Danforth, Samuel Sewall, and John Richards. The court considered the infanticide cases of Grace, the slave who had given birth alone years earlier and then thrust her newborn down her master’s privy, and Elizabeth Emerson, whose twin bastards were found buried in her parents’ garden two years past. Both had been found guilty during the interim government; now Stoughton pronounced the death sentence against them, and their years of waiting in prison ended June 8, 1693, when they were hanged in Boston.

  John Arnold, the Boston jailer, who had attested to the good conduct of Sarah Cloyce and Mary Esty, successfully contested an earlier ruling against him for “allowing” certain prisoners to escape the summer before—suspected burglars and pirates. (The awkwardness of the escaped witch suspects was not mentioned.)

  John Alden, freed on bail, made his appearance for the witchcraft charge. This time no one appeared to speak against him, so the court cleared his case by proclamation. Again, the court chose to ignore the jail break and his fugitive months out of the province. (In contrast, a September Essex County court had fined John Shepard of Rowley a stiff £30 plus costs, the total reduced to £5, for twice helping his sister-in-law Mary Green escape from the Ipswich jail, where she was being held on a witchcraft charge.)

  Mary Watkins, a girl from Milton (south of Boston and far from Salem), also appeared. She had accused her mistress of witchcraft and then, finding no sympathy for her claims, accused herself and attempted a botched suicide before her own arrest. All this only confused the grand jury, whose members asked many questions of the justices and of Mary. After deliberation they pronounced the indictment ignoramus. The court disagreed—presumably meaning Stoughton disagreed—and requested the jury to reconsider. They did, but the verdict was the same. However, enough doubt remained that Stoughton required Mary to find sureties for her future good behavior and to appear at the next sitting for Suffolk. But she lacked the means, and as none of her family obliged, she would petition to be sold as a bondservant to settle the bill.

  The Superior Court’s next sitting was for Essex County and took place in Ipswich on May 9, with Justices Danforth, Richards, and Sewall presiding. Stoughton, perhaps due to the outcome of the Suffolk sitting and as a protest to Phips undercutting his judicial authority, was again absent.

  Over the next three days the grand jury heard the cases of several Andover and Boxford suspects. On May 9 they brought in Tituba, the first to confess, the first to describe a conspiracy of witches, the first to incite—admittedly under duress—the madness among the whites. Her indictment was for covenanting with the Devil and signing his book, but the grand jury recognized that all of the evidence against her was spectral evidence and dismissed her case as ignoramus. They would declare all of the cases in this session ignoramus.

  ____________________

  Tituba stands in the Ipswich meeting house facing the grand jury and wondering if she will have to face the Superior Court justices as well. It is May 9, the first day of the scheduled spring sitting for Essex County. She has never faced those justices before, but she has heard about them, especially Chief Justice William Stoughton. But he is not here, and she hopes that is a good sign.

  She and a cartload of other prisoners have been herded from the Salem jail and carted over the bumpy road to Ipswich, taken from the confines of the prison yard to at least smell the fresh air, to see the green of the season, to be someplace other than the jail. Regardless of whatever awaits them, the trip is a welcome change.

  She hears the clerk read her indictment:

  Jurors for our Sovereign Lord & lady the King & Queen present That Tittapa an Indian Woman servant to Mr. Samuel Parris of Salem Village . . . upon or about the latter end of the year 1691 In the Towne of Salem Village . . . wickedly maliciously & feloniously A Covenant with the Devil did make & Signed the Devil’s Book . . . by which wicked Covenanting with the Devil She the Said Tittapa is become A detestable Witch . . .

  Will she hold to her confession, the story that lit such a blaze of panic? Her master, the unforgiving Reverend Parris, frowning and harried, had already confronted her. Her jail bills were adding up, and he was expected to pay them. But he would not consent to do this if she altered her original story, her incriminating confession—for that would be to admit he had been mistaken all along. She could stay in jail indefinitely as far as he was concerned—or until someone else bought her to satisfy the outstanding debt.

  She thinks of that now, thinks of her own original explanation—not the confession spurred by terror and beatings, but her earlier protests—that she had nothing to do with hurting the girls she loved, that she knew nothing about the Devil’s designs. That had been the truth, and yet no one believed it. So in her desperate straits she had spun a story and had answered their absurd questions the way she thought they expected her to do.

  I did what you asked, she thinks. I obeyed as you expect a slave to obey.

  But now, before the grand jury, she has to calculate.

  What do these gentlemen expect now?

  The jurors have papers before them. Her earlier confession must be among them.

  “Is this true?” the foreman asks.

  If she holds to the lie, Master Parris will pay her bill and she will be released. But released to what? Will he accept her back into his household after all that has happened—she, a woman he thinks is a confessed witch? To live in peace and trust in the same house with the children he thought she menaced? What exactly does he believe about her? She can wait for some unknown party to decide to buy her. Or Parris may pay her fees and then sell her away to be rid of her. If she holds to her confession now, then will she be tried for the witchcraft she did not commit? And then what? The rope? The shallow grave?

  But at last she addresses the grand jury, the court, the legal proceedings confronting her:

  “No,” says Tituba. “None of it is true.

  PART THREE

  Afterword

  Rebecca Nurse

  REBECCA NURSE’S family, focusing all their rage and res
entment on Reverend Samuel Parris, continued to pursue the minister. He called them the dissenting brethren: Samuel Nurse and his brother-in-law Jonathan Tarbell, their neighbor Thomas Wilkins, and occasionally Nurse’s brother-in-law Peter Cloyce, who now lived in Framingham.

  The dissenters insisted that a council chosen from other churches hear their complaint, argued over which churches and which delegates, demanded copies of their opponents’ statements, and refused to specify their own complaints. “They said,” Parris recorded in October 1693, “their offence was against Mr. Parris and not the Church.” But a month later “They openly charged the whole Church as a nest of ­deceivers.”

  They hounded Parris through the summer and fall of 1694 and then into the winter. At one November church meeting that only Tarbell attended, Reverend Parris read aloud an apology.

  Taken by surprise, Tarbell blurted, “[T]hat if half so much had been said formerly, it had never come to this.”

  But it was not enough now.

  Samuel Nurse, Tarbell, and Wilkins all attended another, public meeting—that is, with not just full church members—a week later, this time armed with a list of complaints and finally stating what they had shouted at Parris in his study nearly two years earlier. After some reluctance the dissenters handed Parris their statement.

  They had not attended public services of prayer and preaching, Parris read aloud, because the racket made by persons “under diabolical power and delusions” prevented their hearing what was said, and they feared being accused themselves, as better people than they—meaning Rebecca—were accused, nor did they like the tone of Parris’s sermons. Neither did they participate in the Lord’s Supper because “we esteem ourselves justly aggrieved and offended with the officer who doth ­administer.”

  Parris then read his own statement again, the same that Tarbell had heard the week before. The minister admitted that it was “a sore rebuke, and humbling providence” that the calamity had begun in his own family, that his household included both accusers and accused, and that his servants—Tituba and John Indian—had worked “to raise spirits . . . in no better than a diabolical way” for which “God has been righteously spitting in my face.” Although he did not pretend to understand the mysteries of that year, he now realized that the Devil could counterfeit the specter of an innocent person, that asking the afflicted who hurt them was “to Satan’s great advantage,” that he no longer accepted the self-incriminating confessions, and that “through weakness or sore exercise,” he may have “unadvisedly expressed” himself in public statements.

  Therefore, he beseeched God’s pardon and asked forgiveness of the dissenting brethren “of every offence in this or other affairs, wherein you see or conceive I have erred and offended,” and he asked that all parties seek to resolve the current strife, which only served the Devil’s ends.

  Parris’s admission did not satisfy the dissenters. They still wanted a council of other churches to hear the matter, which stalemated in a series of ill-natured meetings. Finally a council of ten laymen and seven ministers convened at Salem Village in April 1695. The ministers included moderator Increase Mather, who had written Cases of Conscience and interviewed the “confessors,” Samuel Willard, who had helped Philip and Mary English escape, and Cotton Mather, who had cautioned Judge Richards against accepting spectral evidence but had also trusted that the judges knew what they were doing. This council determined that even though Parris had taken “sundry unwarrantable and uncomfortable steps” in that “dark time of confusion,” he was now “brought into a better sense of things, [and] so fully expressed it, that a Christian charity may and should receive satisfaction therewith.” Although they hoped the offended brethren would accept Parris’s apology, they advised the rest of the Salem Village Church to show more compassion to the dissenters, “considering the extreme trials and troubles” they had endured “in such a heart-breaking day.” If “the remembrance of the disasters that have happened” were too much for the dissenters, the church might vote to allow them to transfer their membership to another church. Likewise, if Village “distempers” continued, there would be no shame if Parris left for another post. But “if they continue to devour one another,” then God might be provoked to abandon them to all the desolations of a people that sin away the mercies of the gospel.”

  Francis Nurse, now in his seventies, passed the responsibility of the home farm to his sons and sons-in-law. He divided the remaining land among his eight children equally, with the daughters’ portions deeded to their husbands’ names. He had already conveyed parcels to his sons and sons-in-law as they married, and he gave them the rest now rather than after his death on condition they pay his debts and provide him with at least £14 a year (35 shillings from each). He signed the document on December 4, 1694.

  Meanwhile, the Nurse family were not about to be reconciled with Parris. In March 1695 eighty-four Villagers petitioned the mediating council. As it was impossible for Parris to continue effectively, they asked the council to advise him to leave the Village or allow them to call another, second minister.

  The monthly meeting of area ministers in Cambridge considered this in May and concluded that Parris should leave. But their advice resulted in a petition from 105 of Parris’s supporters, who wanted him to stay, “For we have had three ministers removed already, and by every removal our differences have been rather aggravated.”

  At some point Parris’s opponents circulated an unsigned paper, giving a clear Scriptural condemnation of Parris’s actions in 1692 by citing Leviticus 20:6:

  And the soul that turneth after such as have familiar spirits, and after wizards, to go a-whoring after them, I will set my face against that soul, and will cut him off from among his people.

  During these wrangles Francis Nurse died November 22, 1695, “age 77,” as Parris noted in his records. With the Nurse sons and sons-in-law sharing the expenses, his body was placed in the family burying ground with Rebecca’s.

  Reverend Parris relinquished the pulpit in 1696 but remained in the parsonage, attempting to collect his back pay. Suits and countersuits followed, as rates committees, sometimes including both Thomas and Joseph Putnam, balked at payment.

  On January 14, 1697, Massachusetts observed a public fast to acknowledge several recent calamities, ranging from war with the French to crop failures and the witch trials. These sad events seemed a punishment for some communal sin that needed righting. Therefore, the people, by the day of fasting and prayer, sought to apologize before God and man and to ponder on “whatever mistakes, on either hand, have been fallen into, either by the body of this people, or any orders of men referring to the late tragedy raised amongst us by Satan and his instruments, through the awful judgment of God.” In Boston Samuel Sewall, former Oyer and Terminer judge, not only composed the bill but also stood during the fast service when his minister Reverend Willard read Sewall’s own statement, which took a more personal blame for the miseries of 1692.

  Samuel Nurse and John Tarbell were on the later rates committee when the matter went to arbitration in July 1697. They were not legally or morally bound to pay Parris, they argued, because of the requirement that ministers were to be “orthodox and blameless,” whereas Parris had not only preached “dangerous errors” and “scandalous immoralities” but also committed perjury when he swore that certain persons, such as Rebecca, cast spectral magic against the supposed afflicted. He not only believed the Devil’s accusations but actually promoted them, showing “his partiality therein in stilling the accusations of some, and at the same time vigilantly promoting others.” They submitted this on behalf of themselves, other like-minded Villagers, and those “taken off by an untimely death”—such as Rebecca.

  The arbiters, two of them former witch trial judges Samuel Sewall and Wait-Still Winthrop, determined that the Village nevertheless owed Parris £79:9:6. This time the Village did pay Parris, who, in September 1697, signed over a quitclaim to the parsonage house and land. He left the Village soon af
ter.

  The three dissenters did not return to communion right away, though they seem to have attended the next minister’s sermons. That their only quarrel was with Parris, however, was never true. Young Reverend Joseph Green persuaded the voting church members to show Wilkins, Tarbell, and Nurse that they held no grudges against them, “that whatever articles they had drawn up against the brethren formerly, they now looked upon them as nothing, but let them fall to the ground, being willing that they should be buried forever”—or as buried as any grudges could be in the Village.

  Jonathan Tarbell, Thomas Wilkins, and their wives plus Samuel Nurse’s wife, Mary, all joined with the rest of the full members in taking communion on February 5, 1699, “which,” Green wrote, “is a matter of thankfulness.” (Samuel Nurse was not named among the day’s communicants.)

  Yet neither Samuel nor the other dissenters objected to Reverend Green’s rearrangement of the meeting house seating, even though it placed John Tarbell with John Putnam, Thomas Wilkins with John Putnam’s sons James and John, and Samuel Nurse with Thomas Putnam. Samuel’s wife, Mary, now sat beside Ann Putnam and Sarah Houlton, both of whom had accused Rebecca, and placed Rebecca’s widowed daughter Rebecca Preston with widow Deliverance Walcott, the step-mother of the once-afflicted Mary Walcott.