MARGARET AND PHILLIPA Flower’s interrogation began on 22 January and continued for almost five weeks, culminating on 25 February 1619. Although the Belvoir pamphlet includes a detailed transcription of what was said, it is riddled with inaccuracies and omissions. The first examination of the Flower sisters is dated ‘about the 22 of January’. Given that it was the date that their interrogation began, such uncertainty is odd. Moreover, there are no further examinations recorded until 4 February, which is an unusually long gap. The author tells us that other examinations were used at the trial, but these do not appear in his narrative. And there are no examinations of Joan Flower mentioned at all – even though it would have been customary to conduct at least one at the time of her arrest. Does this scantiness of documentation simply suggest carelessness? Considering the extraordinary lengths that were gone to by the earl and his associates to bring the women to trial, this seems unlikely. The conclusion that naturally follows is that certain documents were deliberately excluded.
The Flower sisters were examined separately, but the similarity of their accounts suggests that their interrogators used any damning evidence from one sister to wring a confession out of the other. The French jurist Jean Bodin advised: ‘One must also make careful note of inconsistencies and repeat many times at different intervals the same line of questioning.’ He also urged that the accused be allowed no respite from the relentless onslaught: ‘One must, if possible, pursue the interrogation concerning all the charges without interruption, so that Satan does not dissuade them from telling the truth.’1
The initial interrogations were conducted by Sir William Pelham and Mr Butler. Both men were set upon wresting a confession out of the women. Although this was by no means necessary to secure a conviction – English juries regularly delivered guilty verdicts on the basis of hearsay, circumstantial evidence or the testimony of just one eyewitness – in a high-profile case such as this, the examiners were determined to leave no room for doubt. They were also determined to convict the sisters not just of witchcraft, but of forming a pact with the Devil. If they succeeded in this, then according to the terms of the 1604 statute, Margaret and Phillipa would be executed.
Initially, both girls held out against the intimidation and threats of their interrogators. Margaret, who was interrogated first, did confess that she had helped her mother bewitch Henry Manners. Some ‘foure or five years since’, Joan had instructed her to steal a glove or some other item of clothing from Lord Henry. When Margaret asked why, her mother replied: ‘To hurt my Lord Rosse.’ In so doing, Joan was following one of the most widespread practices of maleficent witchcraft, for it was commonly believed that obtaining and damaging an item of clothing was a sure means of inflicting harm upon its owner. Upon procuring the glove, Joan had dipped it into boiling water and stroked her cat Rutterkin with it, ‘after which Henry Lord Rosse fell sicke within a weeke, and was much tormented with the same’.
Margaret went on to confess that the earl’s younger son had been bewitched in the same manner some ‘two or three yeares since’. She had (apparently by chance) found one of the boy’s gloves on a dunghill in the grounds of the castle, and had taken it to her mother, who performed the same spell as before, declaring that the young Francis ‘will not mend againe’. This is the only reference to the younger son’s illness in their testimonies. It is interesting that the account of Margaret’s interrogation should have her insisting that the younger boy would not recover. Events would soon prove this prediction to be suspiciously accurate.
Margaret then went into some detail about how she and her mother conspired to put Lady Katherine to death in the same way as the young boys. At Joan’s command, she had stolen a piece of Katherine’s handkerchief from the castle. Her mother had plunged this into hot water, then rubbed it on Rutterkin’s back, ‘bidding him to flye and go’. But the cat had merely ‘whined and cryed Mew’, for he ‘had no power over the Lady Katherine to hurt her’.2 The latter had therefore escaped the fate that her half-brothers had suffered.
Damning though her testimony was, Margaret had so far only admitted to harming the boys, not to causing Henry’s death. The authorities therefore intensified the pressure (perhaps physical as well as psychological) on both girls. ‘If one finds then that the witches do not confess anything, they must be made to change their clothes and have all their hair shaved off, and then undergo interrogation,’ advised Bodin. ‘And if there is partial proof of any strong presumptions, torture must be applied.’ If an interrogator found the prospect of inflicting torture unappealing, Bodin recommended that the threat of it was often enough to achieve the same result, ‘since the fear of torment is itself a torment’. ‘One must give the impression of preparing numerous instruments, and ropes in quantity, as well as assistants for tormenting them, and keep them for some time in fear,’ he wrote. ‘It is also expedient before making the accused go into the torture chamber to have someone cry out with a dreadful cry, as if he were in torment, and tell the accused that it is the torture being applied, dismaying him this way and exacting the truth. I saw a judge who put on such a dreadful face and terrifying voice, threatening hanging if they did not tell the truth, and in this way terrified the accused so much that they confessed immediately, as if they had lost all courage.’ Rebecca Morris, a woman who was arrested and interrogated in 1645, was recorded as having ‘confessed beefore any violence, watching, or other threts’.3 Bodin warned, though, that ‘this technique works with timorous people but not with bold ones’.4 Given the Flower sisters’ reputation for brazenness, they likely fell into the latter category.
Margaret was the first to crack. On 4 February, she confessed to conspiring with her mother to bring about the death of the Earl of Rutland’s elder son.5 She told her examiners that ‘her selfe, her mother, and sister were all displeased with him [Rutland], especially with the Countesse, for turning her out of service’. She had duly gone to Belvoir and found one of the young lord’s gloves on the rushes in the nursery. Upon bringing this back to her mother, she watched as Joan ‘put it into hot water, prickt it often with her knife, then tooke it out of the water, and rubd it upon Rutterkin [her familiar], bidding him height and goe, and doe some hurt to Henry Lord Rosse, whereupon hee fell sick, and shortly after dyed’.6 According to Margaret’s testimony, her mother had thrown the glove on the fire as soon as the spell was cast.
The interrogators were no doubt triumphant at having wrested a confession out of Margaret Flower, and they wasted no time in using it to try to break down Phillipa’s resistance. But the elder sister proved much more stubborn. She consistently refused to admit to murdering Henry Manners; only to causing him to fall sick. She did, though, confess to helping her mother conduct maleficent magic, and told the same tale as her elder sister with regard to the methods used. Her account differed from Margaret’s in only two small details: that her mother had rubbed the glove on Rutterkin’s back before plunging it into hot water, and that she had afterwards buried it in the yard. Interestingly, though, Phillipa made no mention of the bewitching of the younger son, Francis, or of his half-sister, Katherine. This is puzzling, given that otherwise their accounts seem to have been constructed with a painstaking attention to detail. It was with a certain defiance that she insisted that they had done nothing but exact revenge for Margaret’s unjust dismissal from his household. To her mind, he and his wife deserved everything they had suffered as a result.
Both Margaret and Phillipa attested that their mother had cast a spell to render the earl and countess infertile, but their accounts differ in detail. Phillipa simply confessed that ‘shee heard her mother often curse the Earle and his Lady, and thereupon would boyle feathers and blood together, using many Divellish speeches and strange gestures’.7 Margaret went into more detail, claiming that her mother had used wool from the mattress that the countess had given her upon being dismissed from the castle, together with a pair of gloves that Joan’s lover, Mr Vavasour, had procured for her. She put both items into warm water, mixed them with blood, and then rubbed them on Rutterkin’s belly, ‘saying the Lord and the Lady should have more Children but it should be long first’.8 That Margaret should modify the threat of infertility that they had allegedly made towards the earl and his wife is interesting. Perhaps the earl’s intense anxiety about this issue compelled him to put pressure on the interrogators to wrest a more reassuring answer from the women.
Damning though these testimonies were, they were insufficient to secure a conviction for the felony of witchcraft – one that would carry the most severe punishment. Even Margaret had confessed to nothing more than ‘sympathetic magic’; no mention had yet been made of a pact with the Devil. But it was now that both girls were brought face to face with the Earl of Rutland, who joined the interrogations on 25 February with his brother George and Lord Willoughby. This seems to have worked a dramatic effect upon the terrified young women, who together confessed to conspiring with the Devil and his minions. Their testimonies on this occasion were significantly shorter than before, which suggests that Rutland and his companions had applied intense pressure in order to condemn them. It is likely that it was at this point that torture had been introduced. The fantastical nature of the sisters’ confessions – and their uncanny resemblance to those taken in other cases – certainly supports this notion. The earl would have had no fear of reprisals: his royal master had, after all, declared the use of torture to be essential in drawing out the guilt of accused witches. The author of the pamphlet which describes the case was at pains to deny that ‘woemen confessed these things by extreamity of torture’, but he seems to be protesting too much.9
As well as focusing upon the ‘facts’ of the case, the published testimonies of Margaret and Phillipa have a strong sexual undercurrent. Phillipa apparently confessed to having ‘a Spirit sucking on her in the forme of a white Rat, which keepeth her left breast, and hath done for three or foure yeares’. She also admitted that this Spirit had promised to make Thomas Simpson love her ‘if she would suffer it to sucke her, which she agreed unto’. As if to lend credence to this tale, the interrogation includes the precise date when the spirit last sucked Phillipa – the night of Tuesday 23 February.10 Margaret, meanwhile, confessed that she had two spirits sucking on her – one white and the other black-spotted. ‘The white sucked under her left breast, and the blacke spotted within the inward parts of her secrets.’ In return for this sexual favour, they promised to do everything that she commanded.11 The message was clear: women such as Margaret and Phillipa used their sexual wiles to wield power and do evil.
When Margaret and Phillipa confessed to being ‘sucked’ by demons, their interrogators would almost certainly have ordered them to be searched for ‘teats’ or the Devil’s mark to corroborate their story. From as early as 1579, the latter was said to be ‘a common token to known all witches by’.12 The belief was that after a satanic pact had been made, the Devil would suck upon some part of the witch’s body, leaving a mark. For as long as this mark – which was insensible when pricked – remained undiscovered, the Devil’s influence would prevail over the woman in question. He therefore ensured that the mark was ‘placed on a part covered with hair, that it might be more easily concealed: and hence one of the first processes in the examination of a witch was one most shocking to her feelings of modesty, that of shaving her body’.13 The influential pamphleteer Richard Bernard provided a detailed description of what this mark might look like: ‘It’s sometimes like a little teate, sometimes but a blewish spot, sometimes red spots like a fleabiting, sometimes the flesh is sunke in and hollow.’ He admitted that it might be easily mistaken for a ‘naturall mark’, and therefore provided a helpful guide to ‘pricking’ every mark on a suspected witch’s body until one was found which did not bleed.14 It was distinct from – although often confused with – the teat from which the suspect would suckle her familiar.
The person assigned to undertake this brutal task would therefore systematically thrust a long, thick needle (more like a dagger than a pin) into all moles, scars or other marks on a suspected witch’s body until one was located which did not elicit a scream of pain. A whole profession grew up around this belief, as ‘brodders’ or ‘jobbers’ travelled the country to search out and test the marks found upon the accused, in return for a fee. Midwives were also sometimes called upon, which suggests that the examinations were of a very intimate nature. Interestingly, though, in Scotland the ‘witch-pricker’ was always male, which reinforces the sexual nature of these examinations.
One of the most notorious witch-prickers was James or John Balfoure, who proudly professed to ‘discover persouns guiltie of the cryme of witchecraft by remarking the devill’s marke upon some part of their persouns and bodeis and thristing of preins in the same, and upon the presumptioun of this knowledge goes athort the countrie abusing simple and ignorant people for his private gayn and commoditie’. He was eventually banned from the profession by the Privy Council.15 Another man who made a healthy profit from the trade was Alexander Chisholm, who in 1662 was found guilty of having ‘most cruellie and barbrouslie tortured the women by waking, hanging them up by the thombes, burning the soles of their feet at the fyre, drawing of others at horse taills and binding of them with widdies about the neck and feet and carying them so alongst on horseback to prison, wherby and by other tortur one of them hath become distracted, another by cruelty is departed this lyfe, and all of them have confest whatever they were pleasit to demand of them’.16
These practices were both terrifying and humiliating for the women involved. Often, the examinations would be carried out in front of many witnesses. In 1649, the citizens of Newcastle hired a well-known Scottish pricker to rid their town of witches, promising him 20 shillings for every woman he condemned. Thirty women were duly brought into the town hall and subjected to a horrifying ordeal. ‘Presently in sight of all the people, [he] laid her body naked to the waste, with her cloaths over her head, by which fright and shame, all her blood contracted into one part of her body, and then he ran a pin into her thigh, and then suddenly let her coats [skirts] fall, and then demanded whether she had nothing of his in her body but [yet] did not bleed, but she being amazed replied little, then he put his hand up her coats, and pulled out the pin and set her aside as a guilty person, and child of the Devil, and fell to try others whom he made guilty.’17
Margaret Moone, one of the witches interrogated by the self-styled ‘Witchfinder General’, Matthew Hopkins, in 1645, suffered this humiliating and painful ordeal at the hands of a local woman, Frances Mills, who gave evidence in her trial. ‘This Informant saith, that being imployed by the Neighbours of Thorpe [Thorpe-le-Soken, an Essex village] aforesaid, to search Margaret Moone, who was suspected for a Witch, she found three long teats or bigges in her secret parts, which seemed to have been lately sucked; and that they were not like Pyles, for this Informant knows well what they are, having been troubled with them herself.’ Frances then proceeded to examine Margaret’s two daughters, and found that they also had teats in their ‘privy parts’.18
A similarly offensive examination was suffered by a woman interrogated in Bury St Edmunds in 1664. ‘They began at her head, and so stript her naked, and in the lower part of her belly they found a thing like a teat of an inch long, they questioned her about it, and she said that she had got a strain by carrying of water which caused that excrescence. But upon narrower search, they found in her privy parts three more excrescences or teats, but smaller than the former: This Deponent further saith, that in the long teat at the end thereof was a little hole, and it appeared unto them as if it had lately been sucked, and upon the straining of it there issued out white milkie matter.’19
The introduction of witch-pricking as part of the interrogation of a suspected witch gave the authorities licence to sexually abuse their prisoners. But the practice was just part of a much broader sexual fantasy surrounding witchcraft. At their basest level, witchcraft pamphlets were a commercial product sold for entertainment. Part of their appeal was as works of true crime designed to shock and frighten the reader. But a still larger appeal derived from their pornographic nature. Many tell of sexual intercourse between witches and devils, or with animals, of bewitched men being forced to carry out humiliating tasks by women, and of searching women’s genitalia for the Devil’s mark. Newes from Scotland describes the latter in salacious detail: ‘It has lately been found that the Devil does generally mark them [witches] with a private mark, by reason the witches have confessed themselves, that the Devil does lick them with his tongue in some private part of their body, before he does receive them to be his servants, which mark commonly is given them under the hair in some part of their body, whereby it may not easily be found out or seen, although they be searched.’20
The Malleus Maleficarum dedicates an entire chapter to the nature of sexual intercourse between the Devil or his minions and the women who fall under their spell. The authors describe in almost forensic detail how ‘such demons practice the most revolting sexual acts, not for the sake of pleasure but in order to taint the soul and body of those under or on whom they lie’.21 Likewise, the account of Matthew Hopkins’s notorious interrogations includes numerous references to witches’ sexual exploits with devils and familiars. One of the accused, the aged Elizabeth Clarke, confessed that two imps ‘came into this Examinants bed every night, or every other night, and sucked upon the lower parts of her body’. The same defendant confessed that ‘shee had had carnall copulation with the Devill six or seven yeares; and that he would appeare to her three or foure times in a weeke at her bed side, and goe to bed to her, and lye with her halfe a night together in the shape of a proper Gentleman, with a laced band, having the whole proportion of a man, and would say to her, Besse I must lye with you, and shee did never deny him’.22
All of these erotic, often sadomasochistic tales are told with the clinical precision of a medical textbook. In an increasingly puritanical society, these pamphlets provided a much-needed acceptable outlet for men’s baser instincts. The pamphlet about the Belvoir witches is a classic example, and there are sexual references throughout the tale. Evidently wishing to grab his readers’ attention straight away, before the Flower women have even been introduced, the author provides a salacious description of how the Devil typically makes a pact with a witch: ‘for their better assurance and corroboration of their credulity, they shall have palpable and forcible touches of sucking, pinching, kissing, closing, colling and such like’.23
Elizabeth Sawyer, who was tried two years after the Belvoir witches, described how the Devil would suck her ‘a little above my fundament’ and ‘would put his head under my coates, and I did willingly suffer him to doe what hee would . . . He would be sucking of me the continuance of a quarter of an howre, and when hee suckte mee, I then felt no paine at all.’24 In a later trial, a Scottish witch named Isobel Gowdie confessed that her satanic pact had been sealed by having sex with the Devil: ‘He was a large black hairy man, very cold, and I found his semen in me as cold as spring water.’25
The latter was a commonly cited fact. In his work on witchcraft, King James agreed that ‘in whatsoever way he uses it, that sperm seems intolerably cold to the person abused’.26 Jean Bodin claimed that the Devil ‘ejaculated extremely cold semen’, and his compatriot, Jeanne Guillemin, described a case where a woman was seduced by Satan: ‘They were a good half-hour together, and he released extremely cold semen.’27 This rather bizarre detail was rationalised by the Cambridge scholar Henry More, who opined: ‘It stands to very good reason that the bodies of Devils being nothing but coagulated Air should be cold, as well as coagulated Water, which is Snow or Ice, and that it should have a more keen or piercing cold, it consisting of more subtile particles, than those of Water, and therefore more fit to insinuate, and more accurately and stingingly to affect and touch the nerves.’28 Another accused witch, Mary Becket of Suffolk, told how the Devil had appeared to her and told her that he was her husband, and then asked ‘to have the use of her body’. When she denied him, he changed tactics, and ‘came to her in the shape of handsome yonge gentleman with yelloow hayre and black cloaths & often times lay with her and had the carnall use of her’.29
According to some sources, the Devil sometimes deceived the witches whom he had seduced into believing that they had fathered his child. ‘To procure some monstrous birth, either through mixture with the seed of the woman, or else (which I rather incline unto) he may by his skill, through Wind or other pestilent humours, so affect the body of the Witch as that it shall swell, and increase, as in a True Generation . . . and then in the time of the breaking open of the wombe may foist in some Infant stollen else where, or delude the eyes of the beholders with some Impe of his owne, in the shape of a child; or with some dead childe taken up and enlivened to the purpose.’ The same author claimed that the child might sometimes be that of the Devil, which would always be born after ‘a great deale of paine and torment in the bearing and birth: and in the issue, either some Monster or Abortive is brought forth to encrease her sorrow, and procure Horror and Despaire’.30
Other works described ‘sabbats’ (black Sabbaths), when a coven or family of witches would join together – often in a remote place – to worship the Devil. A witch who had made her pact with the Devil would usually attend one of these meetings either immediately afterwards or within a few days. They were sometimes joined by devils and familiars, and sometimes by Satan himself. On these occasions, the sabbats would degenerate into mass orgies between witches and devils. ‘The incubus’s in the shaps of proper men satisfy the desires of the Witches, and the succubus’s serve for whores to the Wizards,’ claimed one late-seventeenth-century source.31 Women were accused of flying to the sabbat on phallic broomsticks, joining in orgiastic dances, copulating indiscriminately with men, women, demons or the Devil himself, and giving birth to demon children.
One of the most lurid descriptions of the sabbats was provided by the French judge Pierre de Lancre, who was a contemporary of the Flower women. According to his account, the witches who attended these gatherings all sought ‘to dance indecently, to banquet filthily, to couple diabolically, to sodomize execrably, to blaspheme scandalously, to pursue brutally every horrible, dirty and unnatural desire, to hold as precious toads, vipers, lizards and all sorts of poisons; to love a vile-smelling goat, to caress him lovingly, to press against and copulate with him horribly and shamelessly’.32 The preface to the Belvoir witch pamphlet agrees that the Devil could ‘attend them in some familiar shape of Rat, Cat, Toad, Bird, Cricket, &c.: yea effectuate whatsoever they shall demaund or desire’.33 Meanwhile, the influential Jean Bodin produced a similarly salacious account:
Marguerite Bremont, wife of Noel Laueret, said that last Monday, after nightfall, she was with Marion her mother at an assembly [of witches] . . . Her aforenamed mother had a chimney-broom between her legs saying – I shall not write the words down – and suddenly they were both transported to the spot indicated above, where they found Jean Robert, Jeanne Guillemin, Mary, wife of Simon d’Agneau, and Guillemette, wife of one named le Gras, who each had a broom. Present also in that place were six devils, who were in human form, but very hideous to look at, and then after the dance was finished the devils laid with them, and had relations with them. Then one of them, who had led her in dance, took her and made love to her two times, and remained with her for the space of more than half an hour.34
Another popular sexual ritual described by the pamphlets was the kissing of the Devil’s buttocks. The North Berwick witches, who were tried in the presence of James VI in 1591, testified that at one of their meetings, the Devil made them ‘kiss his buttocks as a sign of obedience to him’.35 This so disgusted (or aroused) the Scottish king that he repeated it in his book about witchcraft, claiming that ‘the kissing of his [Satan’s] hinder parts’ was a common feature of pacts with the Devil.36 A later authority also described this ritual, which he said commonly occurred at the conclusion of each sabbat: ‘Then each one kissing the Posteriors of the Devil (a sweet bit no doubt) returns upon their aiery Vehicles to their habitations.’37 James, meanwhile, went on to describe in detail how the Devil could ‘abuse’ men or women in ‘abominable’ ways, such as ‘copulating’ or ‘stealing out the sperm of a dead body’.38
There were various recorded sightings of witches having sex with devils:
Manie times witches are seene in the fields, and woods, prostituting themselves uncovered and naked up to the navill, wagging and mooving their members in everie part, according to the disposition of one being about that act of concupiscence, and yet nothing seene of the beholders upon hir; saving that after such a convenient time as is required about such a peece of worke, a blacke vapour of the length and bignesse of a man, hath beene seene as it were to depart from hir, and to ascend that place . . . she hath more pleasure and delight (they say) with Incubus that waie, than with anie mortall man.39
A fifteenth-century manual on witchcraft described the sexual act between a demon and a witch in salacious detail. ‘Although the incubus demon always works visibly from the point of view of the sorceress . . . in terms of the bystanders it is frequently the case that the sorceresses were seen lying on their backs in fields or woods, naked above the navel and gesticulating with their forearms and thighs. They keep their limbs in an arrangement suitable for that filthy act, while the incubus demons work with them invisibly in terms of bystanders, although at the end of the act a very black vapour would (very rarely) rise up from the sorceress into the air up to the height of a human.’ In this way, copulation with a devil could lead to the propagation of evil. Another account describes how devils could creep into a bed and ‘lie down themselves by the side of the sleeping husbands’ before having sex with their wives. It warned: ‘Husbands have actually seen Incubus devils swiving with their wives, although they have thought that they were not devils but men. And when they had taken up a weapon and tried to run them through, the devil has suddenly disappeared, making himself invisible.’40 Even ‘aged and barren’ women were seduced by the Devil or his minions ‘for the purpose of causing pleasure’, and thus binding them to his cause.41
Some authorities claimed that sexual pleasure was greater with a devil than with an ordinary man, which was why so many women fell prey to seduction. Others attested the opposite. A French woman who was accused of witchcraft told her interrogators ‘that when Satan copulated with her she had as much pain as a woman in labour’. Another agreed that ‘while she was in the act, she felt something burning in her stomach; and nearly all the witches say this intercourse is by no means pleasurable to them, both because of the Devil’s ugliness and deformity, and because of the physical pain which it causes them’.42 The French author and sceptic Cyrano de Bergerac scorned the idea of demonic seduction, and said that the reason one ‘encounters ten thousand women for every man’ in such tales is that ‘a woman has a lighter mind than a man and is consequently bolder in inventing comedies of this kind’.43 But this did little to diminish the popularity of such tales.
The illustrations that accompanied witchcraft pamphlets often contained barely disguised sexual imagery, such as witches sitting astride phallic broomsticks, or cavorting naked around a cauldron and playing games of leapfrog. The sixteenth-century German artist Hans Baldung ‘Grien’ was particularly renowned for this genre of painting, and shocked his audience with scenes of a supernatural and erotic nature.44
Towards the end of her interrogation, Margaret seemed to grow increasingly delirious, worn down perhaps by the interminably long days and nights of her captivity. In her final confession, she claimed that four devils had appeared to her one night in Lincoln gaol. ‘The one stood at her beds feete, with a blacke head like an Ape, and spake unto her, but what, shee cannot well remember, at which shee was very angry because he would speake no plainer, or let her understand his meaning: the other three were Rutterkin, Little Robin, and Spirit, but shee never mistrusted them, nor suspected herselfe til then.’45 The last line suggests that Margaret had no conception either that a pet animal could be an evil spirit or that she herself was a witch until her examiners suggested it. As in many other trials, the suspect – her mind addled by fear, discomfort and sheer exhaustion – had been brought to believe everything of which she stood accused.
That the Flower women’s pets should be used as proof of their evil was typical of other witchcraft trials. These ‘familiars’ – demons who took the shape of animals such as dogs, cats, rats, toads or butterflies – were a peculiarly English contribution to witch lore. According to the theory, the familiars assisted the witch in her maleficium and were rewarded by being allowed to suck from her special teat. ‘They have their spirites which they keepe at home in a corner,’ related George Gifford, ‘some of them twoo, some three, some five: these they send when they be displeased, and wil them for to plague a man in his body, or in his cattle.’46 It was a dog named Tomalin – ‘My sweet Tom-boy’ – who was said to have lured the witch of Edmonton to her destruction. Meanwhile, the opening scene of Macbeth has the three witches crying out to their familiars: ‘I come, Graymalkin . . . Paddock calls . . .’47
The seventeenth-century witchcraft trial records are littered with references to such impious creatures. A deposition taken during the trial of Margaret Bates in 1645 included a particularly lurid description of her familiars. She confessed that ‘when she was at work she felt a thinge come upon her legs and go into her secret parts where her marks weare found, and an other time when she was in the Church yard she felt a thinge nip her againe in those parts & further that she had but two teats and they might be made at once suckinge’.48 Likewise, during her interrogation the same year, Anne Usher described how ‘she felt a thinge like a small cat come over her legs once or twice & that it scratched her mightily after that she felt 2 things like butterflies in her secret parts with witchings, dansings and suckinge & she felt them with her hands and rubbed them and killed them’.49 Another suspect told how she suckled seven ‘imps’, but that as she only had five teats, ‘when they came to suck they fight like pigs with a sow’.50 In practice, such creatures were often little more than pets to keep lonely women company in their old age. The affectionate names for them – such as ‘Daynty’, ‘Prettyman’ and ‘Littleman’ – which appear in contemporary trial records support this theory.51
By admitting to her conference with familiars and devils, Margaret had sealed her fate. The inclusion of this extraordinary confession in her testimony may have been an attempt by the authorities to remove any lingering doubt that she was a witch. It may also indicate the use of torture in her interrogation. Conference with the Devil is almost never mentioned in witchcraft examinations until torture – or the threat of it – is introduced. Sometimes this was at an early stage of the proceedings, but at others it did not take place until after the accused had already confessed to maleficium, as was the case here.
The tale of Margaret’s seeing devils whilst in gaol also evokes James I’s own beliefs as set down in Daemonologie. He claimed that if the accused proved obstinate in denying their guilt after they had been arrested, the Devil would appear to them and ‘fill them more and more with the vain hope of some manner of relief’.52 There are other parallels between the contemporary account of the trial and James’s famous work, notably the description of how the Flower women came to make a pact with the Devil, and the means by which they engineered the deaths of the two young boys. The fact that the Belvoir pamphlet’s author refers to Daemonologie in the preface is a further testament to how influenced he was by the book. He may also have been under pressure to flatter the king’s vanity in this way, thus bolstering the earl’s favour with his royal master.
Even if they had not confessed, the likelihood is that Margaret and Phillipa would have met the same fate. Those involved in the seeking out and condemnation of witches at this time reasoned that if a woman did not admit her guilt, this was because ‘the devill hath such power over them, that he will not suffer them to confesse’.53 In short, they were damned if they confessed, and they were damned if they did not.
Having secured a full confession and plenty of fodder to satisfy the judge and jury at the forthcoming assizes (not to mention the scandal-hungry people of Jacobean England), Francis Manners and his fellow examiners concluded their interrogations. Margaret and Phillipa now had to await their trial.