E. Lynn Linton

“ These queer bits of half-papistical, half-nonsensical doggerel were considered tremendous sins in those days, and the use of them was quite sufficient to bring any one to the scaffold; as their application would, for a certainty, destroy health, and gear, and life, if it were so willed. And for all these crimes—storm-raising, cat-baptizing, and the rest—Agnes Sampson, the grave, matronlike, well-educated grace wife of Keith, was bound to a stake, strangled, and burnt on the Castle Hill, with no one to seek to save her, and no one to bid her weary soul God-speed! ”

“ No more witch-fires are now lighted on the Castle Hill; no more grave and reverend divines give themselves up, like Mr. John Aird, to discovering the devil’s mark stamped visibly on human flesh; yet the heart of the people has not abandoned its ancient God, and though the altars may be dressed with the flowers of another season, and the name upon the plinth be carved in other characters, yet is the indwelling idol the same. The God which Calvinistic Scotland yet worships is the same God as that to which the witches and wizards of old were sacrificed ”

“ Poor, brave, beautiful, young Margaret! we, at this long lapse of time, cannot even read of her fate without tears; it needed all the savageness of superstition to harden the hearts of the living against the actual presence of her beauty, her courage, and her despair!
Isobel Crawford was now tried; “after the assistant minister, Mr. David Dickson, had made earnest prayer to God for opening her obdurate and closed heart, she was subjected to the torture of the iron bars laid upon her bare shins, her feet being in the stocks, as in the case of Margaret Barclay.” ”

“ On the 4th of April, 1670, one Major Thomas Weir, an old man of seventy, expiated his crimes on the Gallowlie of Edinburgh. A bad man, surely; a canting, loose-lived hypocrite, who made his puritanism the cloak for his secret crimes, serving sin with his body in daily and most detestable service, while his lips spoke only of zeal to God and the soul’s devoutest exercise. Still, it was a terrible fate for nothing more heinous than an unclean life; a purification by fire in truth, but not for the sanctification of souls. ”

“ The parish officers had taken the old couple into the workhouse for safety, but the mob broke through the gates, and crushed down the doors, and searched the whole place through, from end to end, even to the salt box, “lest the witch should have made herself little,” and have hidden in the corners. But they could not find her, not even there; so, in a rage, they broke the windows, smashed the furniture, and then heaped up straw high against the house, threatening to burn it down, and every living soul within it, if the Osbornes were not given up them. ”

“ Strange that the land of the Lord should have been the favourite camping-ground of Satan, that the hill of Zion should have had its roots in the depths of Tophet!
The formulas of the faith were as gloomy as the persons. The power of the evil eye; the faculty of second sight, which always saw the hearse plumes, and never the bridal roses; the supremacy of the devil in this God-governed world of ours, and the actual and practical covenant into which men and women daily entered with him; the unlimited influence of the curse, and the sin and mischief to be wrought by charm and spell ”

“ Hob listened to her railings patiently, till commanded by the bailie to speak, when says he, “How came she then to know that I had called her a witch? Surely none but the devil, thy old master and mine, has told thee so much.” “The devil and thou perish together, for he is not my master though he be thine. I defy the devil and all his works!” ”

“ My blood be upon my own head; and as I must make answer to the God of heaven presently, I declare I am as free of witchcraft as any child; but being delated by a malicious woman, and put in prison under the name of a witch, disowned by my husband and friends, and seeing no ground of hope of my coming out of prison or ever coming in credit again, through a temptation of the devil, I made up that confession on purpose to destroy my own life, being weary of it, and choosing rather to die than to live. ”

“ The Queen of Faerie was bravely clothed in white linen, and white and brown clothes, but she was nothing like the glorious creature who bewitched Thomas of Ercildoun with her winsom looks and golden hair; and the king was a braw man, well favoured and broad faced; just an ordinary man and woman of the better classes, buxom, brave, and comely, as Isobell Gowdie and her like would naturally take to be the ultimate perfection of humanity. ”

“ If Elizabeth M‘Whirter had lived a generation earlier, she might have run a race with death and a tar barrel, and been defeated at the end, like the poor old wretch at Dornoch.
But still the old faith lingers in those beautiful vales, and hides in the fastnesses of the mountain glens; still brownies haunt the ruined places, and witches send forth blight and bale at their will; still the elfin people ride on the whirlwind and dance in the moonlight ”

“ Whereupon it was assumed that the devil had visited him through the night, and had marked him afresh. They searched him—pulling off every nail with a turkas, or smith’s pincers, and then thrusting in needles up to their heads; but finding nothing more satanic than blood and nerves, they put him to worse tortures, as a revenge. He made no other relapse, but remained constant now to the end; bearing his grievous pains with patience and fortitude, and dying as a brave man always knows how to die, whatever the occasion. ”

“ This fresh and pure idyl comes to us with a sweet and wholesome savour, in the midst of the foul quagmires of superstition where it stands; and that poor husbandman’s simple faith in God’s goodness and his wife’s virtue is more touching than many a grand heroic deed which has the suffrages of all history to float it through the life of the world. ”

“ Bargarran’s daughter still continued bringing out crooked pins and stones and all sorts of unmentionable filth from her mouth, and still went on quarrelling with the devil whom she called an old sow, and holding conversations with the apparitions of her tormentors, still mixed up fraud with epilepsy, and lies and craft and wicked guile with hysteria, till the witch-fires were fairly lighted, and seven of the poor wretches “done to death.” Among whom brave Margaret and her beautiful child held the most prominent place. Never for a moment did Margaret Lang lose her courage or self-possession. ”

“ Can we wonder at anything which it might please those servants of the devil, the witches, to do, when even a spirit—a disembodied ghost—a mere appearance—a spectre—an apparition—could audibly box a lad’s ears before a whole room full of spectators, and at last box them so soundly as to break his neck, and kill him? ”

“ If they chose to accept a case as possession, they prayed and exorcised; but if it seemed good to them to call it witchcraft, then the poor wretch’s life was doomed, and no man might hope to save. It was very seldom they cared so much for humanity as to choose the more merciful of the two absurdities. Sometimes, though, the devil was as good as his word, and made at least an attempt, if a clumsy one, to release his servants: as when he took Helen Eliot from the steeple of Culross where she was confined, and carried her in his arms through the air. ”

“ Youth and life were strong in her, and conquered even malice and poison—conquered even the fiendish determination of the lady, “that she would do, by all kind of means, wherever it might be had, of God in heaven, or the devil in hell, for the destruction and down-putting of Marjory Campbell.” ”

“ And when James VI. came with his narrow brain and selfish heart, to formularize the witch-lie into a distinct canon of arbitrary faith, and give it increased political significance and social power, the reign of humanity and common sense was at an end, and the autocracy of cruelty and superstition began. It is a dreary page in human history; but so long as a spark of superstition lingers in the world it will have its special and direct uses. ”

“ Her friends and husband exhorted her to prayer and patience, but she still continued marvellously holden, the Devil getting quite the better of her until Sunday night, when she seemed to come to her worst. Suddenly the candle, which they had not been noticing, went out, and she set up a lamentable cry; they lighted another, but it burnt so dim it was almost useless, and the friends and neighbours themselves began to be disquieted. Wildly and hurriedly cried Margaret, “Look! do you not see the Devil?” herself all terrified and disturbed. They bade her be still and pray. ”

“ Even this horrible scene does not seem to have had any effect in humanizing men’s hearts, or opening their eyes to the infamy into which their superstition dragged them; for still the witch trials went on, and the young and the old, and the beautiful and the unlovely, and the loved and the loveless, were equally victims, cast without pity or remorse to their frightful doom. ”

“ For many weeks this strange kind of lingering disease and discomfort went on, he “still growing worse, having no appetite, and his body strangely emaciated,” all because of Beatrix having “slockened” fire coals in a vessel as a malevolent charm for him; till about May the disease ripened, and the symptoms of hysteria and epilepsy presented themselves. He swelled prodigiously; his breathing was like the blowing of a pair of bellows; his body was rigid and inflexible; his tongue was drawn into his mouth ”

“ They have always been the greatest adversaries of all truth. Of late, thank God, the march of humanity has been steadily, if slowly, towards the daylight; but at present you and I, my reader, have to do with the most debasing superstition that ever afflicted history, in the matter of those poor wretched servants of the devil—those witches and wizards, who somehow managed to lose on all sides—to suffer in time and be ruined for eternity, and to get only ill-will and ill-usage from man and fiend alike. ”

“ Jane Wenham was this latest offshoot of the old tree of judicial bigotry; not the latest fruit, but the last instance of the law and judgment. There is a report current in most witch books [Pg 418] of a case at a later period—but I can find no authentic account of it—that, in 1716, of a Mrs. Hicks and her little daughter of nine, hanged at Huntingdon for selling their souls to the devil, bewitching their neighbours to death and their crops to ruin, and, as a climax to all, taking off their stockings to raise a storm. ”

“ His wife, suspecting evil doings, went to a cunning woman, who showed her in a glass the likeness of the witch who had destroyed him, wearing an old red cap with corners, such as women were used to wear. The old red-capped woman was taken, tried, soon brought to confess to the bewitching of the man, and executed. But before she died she told them all, how that she had a spirit in the likeness of a yellow dun cat, which came to her one night as she sat by the fire nursing angry thoughts against a neighbour with whom she had fallen out. ”

“ The younger, being very serious and religious, waited for two or three years before she settled herself, then married a good, honest, sober farmer, with whom she lived well and prosperously; her gear increasing yearly, and herself the happy mother of a pretty child. Her sister was moved to envy to see all this prosperity and contentment, and in her passion made a compact with the devil, by which she became a witch for the purpose of killing her sister’s child as the greatest despite she could do them. ”

“ Matthew Hopkins struck a few dashes of colour over the canvas, telling the judges that Rebecca had told him she was made a witch by her mother; and that when she met the four other goodies in Clarke’s house, the devil, or their familiars, had come, now in the shape of a dog, then of two kittyns, then of two dogs—and that they first did homage to Elizabeth Clarke, skipping up into her lap and kissing her, and then to all the rest, kissing each one of them save Rebecca. Afterwards, when Satan came as a man, he gave her kisses enough: and not quite so innocently as the “kittyns and the dogges.” ”

“ Upon this the executioner came into the prison, but fell stone dead as he crossed the threshold. Hastily the magistrates offered a reward to the executioner’s wife if she would undertake her husband’s office, and strangle the poor mad fellow before he was burnt; which she agreed to do, for all that she was in great pain and grief, clapping her hands and crying, “Dool for this parting my dear burd Andrew Martin!” When the warlock heard that a woman was to put him to death, he fell into a passion of crying, saying that the devil had deceived him, and “let no man ever trust his promises again!” ”

“ Joan’s ghostly lovers fighting with cowl staves and breaking each other’s heads out of jealousy and revenge: and the last record of the case is, that Sir Henry Cromwell left an annual sum of forty shillings to provide for a yearly sermon against witchcraft, to be preached at Huntingdon by a B.D. or D.D. member of Queen’s College, Cambridge. How terrible to think that three human lives were sacrificed for such wild and wilful nonsense, and that sane and thoughtful and noble-minded people of this present day walk on the way towards the same faith! ”

“ Her indictment was very heavy; fifty-three counts in all; for the most part relating to the curing of disease by charm and incantation, and to foreknowledge of sickness or death. Thus, she took on herself the sickness of Robert Kerse in Dalkeith, then cast it back, by mistake, on Alexander Douglas, intending it for a cat or a dog: and she put a powder containing dead men’s bones under the pillow of Euphemia Macalzean, when in the pains of childbirth, and so got her safely through. As she went on, and grew more thoroughly weakened in mind and body, she owned to still more monstrous things. ”

“ Leading her quietly to a denial of all she had asserted, Sir Edward got her to confess that she was an impostor, and that every article of her accusation was a lie and a fallacy from beginning to end. She had never known nor seen any devils; she had never been cast upon the henroof nor upon the hay-mow, but when she was found there she had gone of her own accord, and had covered herself with hay and straw to better prove the witches’ despite against her; she knew nothing of any child done to death by nails in its body ”

“ At Lauder, in 1649, Hob Grieve was accused of witchcraft. Twenty years agone his wife, who had been burnt for a witch, told Hob that he might get rich if he would follow her counsel and go along with her. So he went with her to a haugh on Gallow-water, to meet, as she said, a gentleman there; but he saw only a large mastiff dog, “which amazed him.” At last came the devil as a black man, telling him that if he would take suit and service with him he should be made rich. He was to be officer at the meetings, and hold the door at the sabbaths. ”

“ In those instances where crutches were thrown away, and fits suddenly brought to a close, the instant the law had laid its gripe on the neck of the unfortunate accused, we have no choice but to refer the whole proceedings to imposture quickened by enmity or the desire of notoriety; but there were cases where a strange and sudden disease did really appear as bewitchment to the afflicted, and of these one would be glad to know the after mental condition when the obsessing witch was killed, yet the obsessing sickness unconquered. Did experience ever open their eyes or shake their faith? ”

“ There be many of them everywhere.” But as they went towards it, the weasel or lobster vanished clean out of sight. “Surely,” said the gentleman, “it is thy spirit.” But still she denied, “and with that her mouth was drawn all awrie.” When a little further pressed she allowed all, and the gentleman, being no justice, sent her home, exhorting her to go to a magistrate and ease her soul by confession. As she got home she was met by another witch who came violently enraged against her. “Ah, thou beast! what hast thou done? thou hast bewrayed us all!” ”

“ Judge Archer thought so; especially when was added to this testimony Julian’s own enforced confession, of how she had been often tempted by the devil to become a witch, but would never consent; yet how one evening, walking about a mile from her house, she met three persons riding on broom-staves, borne up about a yard and a half from the ground, two of whom she knew—a witch and a wizard, hanged for witchcraft several years ago—but the third, a black man, she did not then know. He however tempted her to give up her soul, which she did by pricking her finger and signing her name with her blood. ”

“ No evidence was too meagre for the witch-hunters; no accusation too absurd; no subterfuge or enormity sufficiently transparent to show the truth behind. When Margaret Aiken, “the great witch of Balwery,” [15] went [Pg 45] about the country dilating honest women for witches, “by the mark between their eyes,” it was evident to all but the heated and credulous, such as John Cowper, the minister of Glasgow, and others, that she used this as a mere means to save time, she herself having been tortured into confession, and now seeing no way of safety but by complicity and witch-finding. ”

“ This was on the 14th of January—the day of the solemn fast, which was all the help that the awakening reason of the times would allow the Honourable Patrick Sandilands. True, the witch and her confederates were in prison, but there was no gallows planted, and no fire set: only the ministers, and elders, and saints, and people, convened in solemn and sacred prayer, to beseech God to drive out the devil from a lying, mischievous, hysterical lad. But crazy William Mitchell took very little by this move, Lord Torphichen not favouring his pretensions to special and private illumination. ”

“ This was to establish direct communication. “Innocency dreads no danger: the child will play with the Bee for his gaudy Coat, and mistrusts not his sting,” says this flowery tract; but soon after Jane had thus committed herself to transfers and communication with the witch, the “devil, who is a sly thief, and though he keeps his servants poor, yet indues them, with a plentifull stock of malice, revenge, and dissimulation,” suffered this bad woman, or this cunning man, to afflict Jane, but not so grievously as they were suffered to do hereafter. ”