London, Friday, April 30, 1602. The last year of Elizabeth I’s reign. A 14-year-old girl, Mary Glover, the daughter of a well-to-do shopkeeper, left her house on Thames Street to run an errand for her mother. She soon arrived at her destination, the house of Elizabeth Jackson, a neighbor with whom she had quarreled in the past, where she sought to deliver her message. Seizing the opportunity, however, the old woman drew the teenager indoors, “locked the dore upon her,” and rained down imprecations and threats on the young girl’s head, cursing her for damaging her reputation in the community and for meddling with her own daughter’s apparel, and “wishing an evill death to light upon her.” For upwards of an hour, the old crone ranted and raved at Mary, till finally she relented and let her go, with the parting injunction that “My daughter shall have clothes when thou art dead and rotten.”1
Understandably, the encounter left young Mary pale and shaken. Savoring her triumph, Elizabeth Jackson crowed to a servant in the house next door, Elizabeth Burges, that she had “ratled up” the young creature, and added: “I hope an evill death will come unto her.”2 On the following Monday, apparently not content with her first round of curses, Jackson showed up at the Glovers’ shop, ostensibly to see Mary’s mother. Glaring and snarling at the girl as she sat drinking a posset, she spoke harshly to her, then abruptly turned on her heel and left.
Immediately seized by a choking sensation, Mary found she could no longer swallow her posset. Her throat seemed to swell and close, though not enough to inhibit her breathing. She went to a family friend for help, only to find herself “speechles and blynde.”3 Brought back to her father, she continued to have fits three and four times a day. By Wednesday, “her fittes were so fearfull, that all that were about her, supposed that she would dye.” Her parents asked that the church bells “be touled for her,” and hearing the sound, Elizabeth Jackson rushed next door rejoicing. “I thank my God,” she announced, “he hath heard my prayer, and stopped the mouth and tyed the tongue of one of myne enemies … The vengeance of God on her and on all the generation of them.”4
God’s vengeance apparently did not stretch so far as to cause Mary’s demise, but over the following weeks, the fits continued, and eventually got worse. Eating proved difficult. To keep her alive, nutrients were periodically thrust down Mary’s throat. (She had developed a preternatural capacity to have fingers or instruments thrust far down her gullet without gagging.) Next, she developed a paralysis of a hand, then an arm, and then of her whole left side. Her belly swelled. Further periods of blindness and inability to speak were accompanied by more swelling of the throat. The fits seemed worse every other day, but always came on when she tried to eat.
On two occasions she encountered Mistress Jackson, first in the shop, and then at church, after which her symptoms took a still more dramatic turn:
she was turned round as a whoop [hoop], with her head backward to her hippes; and in that position rolled and tumbled, with such violence, and swiftness, as that their paynes in keeping her from receiving hurt against the bedsted, and postes, caused two or three women to sweat; she being all over colde and stiff as a frozen thing. After she had ben thus tossed and tumbled in this circled roundnes backward, her body was suddenly turned round the contrary way, that is, her head forward betweene her leggs, and then also rowled and tumbled as before.5
The weeks that followed were beset with other writhings and contortions of the body; dancings and prancings; movements in slow motion into postures that seemed impossible to sustain; strange patterns of breathing and alterations of countenance; “many strange anticke formes” of the mouth, “distortions, gapings and blastings,” accompanied by odd vocalizations; while, at other times, she mimed shooting a bow and arrow or plucking at the strings of a harp, yet seemed “dumbe, blynde, and senseless.”6 In the midst of her fits, she at times shouted out her gratitude to God, and called upon Him to deliver her from her afflictions. As word spread of these dramatic posturings, crowds of pious Puritans, augmented by the skeptical and the curious, gathered to view the spectacle.
Finally, after some weeks, Glover was brought to the Sheriff’s house to meet face-to-face with the woman whose imprecations had coincided with the origins of her torments. It was one of several such meetings, all accompanied by still more spectacular and frightening outbursts, physical and verbal, that lasted for hours: paralyses, trances, tics, spasms, and contortions that resembled a creature possessed; roaring cries and grimaces; exhibitions of torment that served to “make her a like terror to all beholders” (p. 14); invocations of the Almighty; a shrinking from contact with Elizabeth Jackson; and, at the height of the drama,
the mouth being fast shut, and her lips close, there cam a voice through her nostrils, that sounded very like (especially at som time) Hange her, or Honge her. The repetition whereof, never ceased, so long as that Elizabeth Jackson was to be found within the compas of that roofe; and she no sooner departed the house, but the voice ceased presently.7
What to make of it all? Sensing that Mary’s reactions might all be a carefully contrived act, those around her tried a number of experiments to expose the counterfeit. Both Glover and Jackson were ordered to appear before Mr Crooke, the Recorder of London, at his rooms in the Inner Temple. Mary Glover was brought in first. Crooke then resorted to a subterfuge:
he choose out a woman both aged, homely, grosse bodyed, and of lowe stature, very comparable to Elizabeth Jackson. Her did he cause to put on Elizabeth Jacksons hatt, and a muffler on her face, and then brought her up to the chamber where Mary Glover was, caused Mary to walke by her, two or three returnes, and to touch the woman once….8
Nothing. Then, the first woman having left the room, Elizabeth Jackson appeared, disguised in the clothes of another. At once, the fits returned, along with the voice through the nostrils demanding that Jackson be hanged. Seeing Glover apparently senseless, the Recorder called for a candle, and brought the flame up to her cheek, and then near to her eyes, as though to burn and blind her. Glover’s wide-eyed stare was unblinking. He called for some pieces of paper, crumpled them up, and lit them, thrusting the burning objects one after another into the palm of her right hand. No reaction was forthcoming (though, when Glover recovered from her fit, her hand was visibly burned “in five severall places”). “When he saw this setled insensibilitie, he proved the fyre upon [Jackson’s] hand, who cryed upon him not to burne her … Then Mr Recorder caused Elizabeth Jackson to kneele downe, and say the Lords prayer: therein (as she ever used to doe) she skipped Deliver us from evill …,” upon which her teenage accuser convulsed, and, in a strange nasal voice, again called out “hang her, hang her.”9
How was one to make sense of these dramatic events? For large numbers of Glover and Jackson’s contemporaries, occupying a world where God and the Devil were omnipresent, where the supernatural and natural worlds overlapped and constantly collided, the meanings to attach to this narrative were obvious. Mary Glover’s actions and reactions were those of a person bewitched or diabolically possessed. And the source of her possession was none other than Elizabeth Jackson, who stood revealed as the witch who had cast a spell on her, the agent of the Devil himself.
Such was the judgment of hoi polloi, soon ratified in legal proceedings. Arraigned before the Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas, Sir Edmund Anderson, and a number of other judges, the illiterate old woman stood accused of being a witch. Anderson was notorious as a witch-finding judge, heightening the old woman’s peril. Yet at the trial not all were convinced of her guilt, and Jackson was not without her defenders. A number of the spectators clearly sided with her and viewed her adolescent accuser as a counterfeit and a fraud. Anderson would have none of it. Elizabeth Jackson was guilty as charged, and sentenced to a year’s imprisonment, and to stand several times in the pillory.