1657-61.] ARTHUR HOWLAND. —QUAKER SYMPATHY. 489 declaring, as the latter certified, that he would "have a In September, 1661, Charles II. sent Massachusetts an order that she suspend the execution or other corporal punishment of Quakers, and forward the offenders for trial in England. This "King's Missive" is gravely warped and misrepresented by modern Quaker writers and others. It neither censured what had been done, nor expressed any pity for the sufferers. It simply granted a change of venue. There is also a suppression of the fact that the next June the same sovereign sent a supplementary King's missive, which contained the following passage: 1 Henry Howland is first noticed in 1633; he succeeded Christopher Wadsworth, the first constable of Duxbury; for several years he was on the Colony's grand jury, but when the Quaker troubles began, he, with four others, refused to serve in that body; in 1651 he was bail for John Rogers, who was fined 5s. for villifying the ministry." Arthur Howland first appears in 1640; in 1651 he was admonished by the Court for absence from church at Marshfield. " "We cannot be understood to direct, or wish, that any indulgence shall be granted to those persons, commonly called Quakers, whose principles, being inconsistent with any kind of government, we have found it necessary, by the advice of Parliament here, to make a sharp law against them, and are well contented that you do the like there." On the receipt of the first letter Massachusetts suspended action; but on the arrival of the second, her laws were again sharply administered. In New Plymouth a few harsh clauses lingered on her statute-book, but public opinion rendered them nearly inoperative. Yet Prence, until his death a dozen years later, seems to have retained hostility to Cudworth and Robinson, who had resisted his intolerant policy. He and his friends felt that in harrying Quakers they were doing God service; but, nevertheless, a severe execution of the laws was exceptional with them, and they often exercised leniency on slight pretexts. It has been well suggested that, for four years, they tried to subdue one kind of fanaticism with another, and when Reason became their guide, she soon controlled the Quakers also. CHAPTER LVIII. WITCHCRAFT. — EDUCATION. -THE KING'S COMMISSIONERS. IT T is grateful to turn from the scenes of the last chapter to New Plymouth's action as to witchcraft. The belief in this was world-wide. It had been stimulated by Pope Innocent VIII., one of whose agents boasted of having burned nine hundred witches. In our Colonial era, some of the German states were burning six hundred a year, while in Italy, Switzerland, and Sweden the slaughter was also terrible. In the sixteenth century, as is estimated, Continental Europe sacrificed one hundred thousand lives on this ground. The most affectionate husbands, wives, parents, and children, as soon as the mere charge of witchcraft was heard, felt their love to have been the work of the devil, and became frenzied destroyers of those who had just before been so dear. Sex, age, and religious character were no protection, nor was rank always so. The Pope stimulated the Roman Catholic nations to activity, as Luther and Calvin did the Continental Protestants; and the Churches of Scotland and England were both zealous in destroying witches. Under the Long Parliament were three thousand of these victims, and in ten years of its session there were four thousand in Scotland. Most of these suffered the horrible death of burning alive, though many were murdered by ordeals. Mackay estimates that in a period of time which is more than covered by the life of John Alden of the "Mayflower," forty thousand of these executions took place in England. This was an extravagant estimate; but the fact that he thought it reasonable indicates that the actual result must have been extremely horrible. So late as 1716 the English courts sent a witch to the gallows; in 1722 one was burned in Scotland; in 1786 one in Ireland; and in 1793, which was a hundred and one years after the last execution in New England, one was executed in Germany. In 1773 the United Presbytery of Scotland bore testimony to the terrible danger of witchcraft; and in 1757 several learned divines of that country had condemned the wickedness of George II. in not vetoing an act which, they charged, defied that law of God which forbids a witch to live. Witchcraft was taught by all the churches of the time, and it is even fairly deducible from many of the creeds of to-day. While the Pilgrims were in Holland, James I. wrote a book to impress more strongly on the Church of England the prevalence of witchcraft, especially among aged women, and the high duty of exterminating it without mercy. From the Mediterranean to the Arctic, Christendom was mad on the subject, and horrors prevailed in all directions.1 Of course this superstition crossed the sea with emigraThe Puritans of the Bay and the Connecticut, the 1 In the District of Como, Italy, in the sixteenth century, a thousand witches were burned in a single year, and about a hundred annually for long after. In the seventeenth century five hundred were slaughtered in Protestant Geneva, with not half the total population of Massachusetts, which in that century hanged the nineteen so often cited by those who are unjustly silent as to the thousands of burnings in the Old World. In England, in the same century, Lord ChiefJustice Mansfield and the "sainted" Baxter hounded on the "witch-finders" of the Long Parliament; in 1644 Sir Matthew Hale sentenced a witch to be burned, and Alice Hunsdon was burned at York for receiving 30s. at various times from Satan. At Boston, the first witch execution was the hanging of Mary Jones in 1648; the next was that of Mistress Ann Hibbins, widow of an honored magistrate. There are vague rumors of two cases at Dorchester. Before 1650 Goodwives Bassett and Knapp were hanged in Connecticut on this charge. At Salem fifty-five pleaded guilty, but none so pleading were hanged. Hence, husbands and children often persuaded the accused to confess. Of those pleading not guilty, nineteen were hanged. A belief in witchcraft is even now prevalent among the lower classes of most sections of Europe. Since these pages were thought prepared for the press, alleged witches have been hunted by mobs in England and Germany, and burned alive in Russia and Poland. 1661-77.] PLYMOUTH'S WITCHCRAFT-CASES. 493 men of New Hampshire, the liberals of Rhode Island, the Dutch at Manhattan, the Episcopalians of Virginia, the settlers of Maryland, and even the Quakers of Pennsylvania, all recognized witchcraft by passing savage laws against it; and several of these Colonies put their laws in execution. That New Plymouth should escape the contagion was impossible; and she, too, had her law for the execution of witches. But the force of a law lies in "the application of it." Her first case arose in 1661. Dinah, wife of Joseph Sylvester, of Scituate, claimed to have seen her neighbor, the wife of William Holmes, in conversation with the devil, who was in the form of a bear. The sensible Holmes brought a suit for slander, which was tried by the General Court, Governor Prence presiding. Dame Sylvester described the interview; but the story must have been very coarse, for the modest Morton merely filled up the proper number of lines with rows of stars. In most Christian countries Mrs. Holmes' life would not have been worth a day's purchase, but Plymouth showed a degree of common-sense altogether novel in such cases. Dame Sylvester was declared guilty of slander, and was ordered to be publicly whipped, or to pay Mr. Holmes £5; or that she openly confess her slander, and repay Holmes' costs and charges. That she chose to do the latter is no more remarkable than that the result discouraged witch-searching for many years. The second case was in 1677 (N. S.), four years after Prence's death. An elderly matron, Mary, wife of Thomas Ingham, of Scituate, was charged with bewitching Walter Woodworth's daughter Mehitabel, causing her to fall into violent fits until "almost bereaved of her senses, and so hath greatly languished," all by the "help of the devil, in a way of witchcraft or sorcery." Goodwife Ingham pleaded not guilty, and put herself "on trial of God and the country." The jurors, well worthy of honorable mention, were Mr. Thomas Huckins, John Wadsworth, John Howland (second), Abram Jackson, Benaiah Pratt, John Black, Mark Snow, Joseph Bartlett, John Richmond, James Talbot, Seth Pope, |