THE ESSEX SOCIETY FOR ARCHAEOLOGY & HISTORY
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by Weyer and Scot were the two most important sceptical
works on witchcraft published in the sixteenth century; James
mentioned them not because he agreed with their ideas but
because he wrote his demonology in order to refute them.
Weyer argued that people should not be executed for witchcraft
(
even if they confessed to the crime) because they were usually
poor, weak, melancholy old women who had been tricked,
deluded or persuaded by the devil into believing that they
could do impossible things, and were therefore deserving of
sympathy. Scot also exhorted his contemporaries to have pity
for the old women who were usually accused of witchcraft
by their neighbours but was much more radically sceptical
than Weyer, condemning all magic as cousening (trickery)
and denying the possibility of any demonic intervention in
everyday life.
76
Certain sections of the copy of Weyer which
is still in the Plume Library are heavily annotated in Latin
in what appears to be Plume’s hand, suggesting that he read
Weyer in unusual detail and would thus have been exposed
to Weyer’s idea that the persecution of people for the crime
of witchcraft (indeed for any spiritual sin) was wrong.
77
The
original Plume copy of Scot has unfortunately gone missing
from the Library, so we will never know if it was annotated.
78
However, Plume may have read it (or at least parts of it) as
carefully as he seems to have read Weyer. One section which
might have caught Plume’s attention was Scot’s damning
critique of the biblical story of the Witch of Endor: like Dr
Child, Scot believed that the raising of Samuel from the
dead was a deception worked on Saul by the Witch and her
‘
confederate priest’ accomplice.
79
Another annotated Plume Library text which links Plume
with James I’s sceptical position regarding cases of ‘possessed’
children is a pamphlet called
The Boy of Bilson
,
which was
published in London in 1622.
80
It discusses the case of twelve-
year-old William Perry from Bilson in Staffordshire who
in 1620 began to have strange fits and to accuse a woman
called Joan Cox of having bewitched him. She was tried (and
probably acquitted) at the Staffordshire Assizes in August 1620.
Particular care was taken by the judges to examine Perry’s
behaviour carefully because of James’s personal intervention
in a similar case in Leicester in 1616, when the testimony
of another ‘possessed’ boy called John Smith had secured
the executions of nine women. James had personally cross-
examined Smith after the Leicester trials and declared him a
liar. After the trial of Joan Cox in Staffordshire in 1620 William
Perry was committed to the care of the Bishop of Lichfield and
Coventry, Thomas Morton. Morton and his secretary Richard
Baddeley subjected Perry to various tests and eventually
exposed him as a fraud. Perry duly confessed that he had
simulated the possession, although most of the pamphlet that
Baddeley subsequently compiled about the case was a virulent
criticism of the attempted exorcism of Perry (whose parents
were Catholic) by Catholic priests in an attempt to prove the
superior power of their faith.
81
The
Boy of Bilson
pamphlet was thus one of the last
contributions to the controversy about exorcism which had
arisen between Puritans, Anglicans and Catholics in the latter
part of Elizabeth I’s reign and which was often expressed in
the context of cases of possessed children such as Perry. The
Church of England, under the leadership of the Bishop of
London, Richard Bancroft and his secretary Samuel Harsnett
(1561–1631;
Archbishop of York, 1629–31), insisted that
the age of direct physical miracles was past and forbade
exorcism (without express episcopal permission, which was
rarely given) in 1603. This was in opposition to the efforts
of fugitive Catholic priests and the Puritan exorcist John
Darrel, who had been actively trying to score points against
the Anglicans in their attempted exorcisms of supposedly
possessed children in the late sixteenth century.
82
The Plume
Library contains two other texts related to this controversy:
a pamphlet from 1598 defending the possession case of
William Sommers of Nottingham and his dispossession
by Darrel against detractors as genuine,
83
and a 1602
tract published by Darrel defending his role as an exorcist
against Anglican critics.
84
Although neither is annotated,
their presence in the Library may testify to Plume’s interest
in the themes of possession and fraud; his support for the
Anglican position on the subject may be inferred from the
overall support he displayed for the Church of England in
his churchmanship and notebooks,
85
in which Plume also
recorded an anecdote in praise of Colchester-born Harsnett’s
erudition as a Cambridge student.
86
The detailed annotations on the
Boy of Bilson
pamphlet, made very probably by Plume, show that he agreed
wholeheartedly with the anti-Catholic stance of Baddeley. For
example, Plume has underlined the ‘tricks’ Perry confessed he
was taught by the priests in order to enable him to simulate
possession (ranging from ‘how to grone and mourne’ to how
to ‘put crooked pinnes, rags, and such like baggage into my
mouth, that I might seeme to vomit them vp’), numbering
them from one to ten in the margin and labelling them
sarcastically ‘Ten Catholicke lessons’.
87
Plume goes on to
underline references in the text to the witch-water and holy-
water used on Perry by the priests, asking in the margin,
‘
Are not these waters fit to be added to Dr Antonies, & other
Physitians, to furnish a Ladies closett?’
88
In conclusion Plume
notes of the priests that ‘The skill these have in Divells one
would thincke they were all of one acquaintance, & p[er]haps
all of a kindred’.
89
In other words, if the priests really were as
knowledgeable in demonic matters as they claimed, it was
probably because they were devils themselves!
90
The
Boy of
Bilson
annotations thus clearly demonstrate Plume’s approval
of the unmasking of fraud (and especially of fraud perpetrated
by Catholic priests), with Baddeley and Morton in the role of
the rational fraud-exposer that was taken by Dr Child and
James I in the other MS. 30 anecdotes.
I do not, of course, want to suggest that Plume was a
radical sceptic along the lines of Reginald Scot; it was one
thing to laugh over the exposure of fraudulent possessions, or
at people made to look foolish by their belief in cunning folk,
and quite another to suggest, as Scot had begun to do in 1584,
that there was no possibility of any supernatural intervention
in the world. Taken to its extreme logic this idea could lead
to atheism, and it was anxiety about the dangers of atheism
which shaped writings about witchcraft in the second half of
the seventeenth century. Philosophers like Henry More, whom
we encountered earlier as Plume’s contemporary at Christ’s,
91
wrote about witchcraft, not because they necessarily wanted to
execute people for the crime, but because they regarded cases
of witchcraft (along with those of poltergeists, ghosts, angels
and demons) as empirical evidence of a spiritual world of
which God was a part; to deny the possibility of spirits thus
risked denying God.
92
As an Anglican cleric himself, it was