Free In the Devil's Snare by Mary Beth Norton

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    Taken together, the Boston and Bury St. Edmunds incidents provided the magistrates of 1692 with relevant valuable precedents and models, especially when supplemented with the learned writings of English and American jurists and clergymen. The behavior of the Salem Village afflicted, far from being unique, resembled various prior counterparts; other physicians, much more distinguished than Dr. William Griggs, had pronounced children bewitched on the basis of similar evidence. That Sir Matthew Hale, known to be cautious in his handling of witchcraft cases, had found spectral testimony credible was certainly reassuring. Goody Glover, confronted in the courtroom, had confessed her guilt and demonstrated dramatically and convincingly how she employed poppets to bewitch the Goodwin children. Faced with such overwhelming evidence, who—as Cotton Mather wrote— could possibly deny the existence of witches or their malicious intent? 66
    But at the end of the first week of March there remained the problem of properly identifying the witches responsible for the afflictions in Salem Village. Three had been named by one teenager and three children (who were too young to be wholly trustworthy witnesses), all of whom continued to suffer torments. One of those witches had confessed, naming the other two and also revealing the presence of additional, though still unidentified, witches in Boston and Salem Village. Two new suspects, Elizabeth Proctor and Dorcas Good, had been named but not questioned.
    The examining magistrates, John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin, did not yet have to consider whether the evidence they were developing would be sufficient for conviction at a trial. At the time, Massachusetts was being ruled by an ad hoc government established in April 1689 after the overthrow of the autocratic English governor, Sir Edmund Andros, in the colony’s version of the Glorious Revolution. The Salem magistrates probably realized that no suspects would be tried until that interim government had been replaced by a formally reconstituted one, an event they knew would soon occur. In late January 1691 ⁄2, “almost at the same Time” as Bostonians learned of the raid on York, they heard that the Maine-born Sir William Phips had been appointed governor of the colony under a newly issued charter, and two weeks later a copy of the charter itself arrived, causing “much discourse,” according to Samuel Sewall, a Boston merchant and magistrate. Although the ad hoc government had occasionally convicted men for capital offenses, it would have been foolhardy in the extreme to conduct a witchcraft trial knowing that its legitimacy would almost immediately be called into question. Consequently, until Phips arrived to organize the government under the new charter, there was little possibility of proceeding to a trial of anyone who had been, or might be, accused. 67
    Even so, Hathorne and Corwin confronted a daunting task. If Tituba’s confession was credible (and certainly John Hale found it so), then they bore the responsibility of uncovering a witch conspiracy of unknown extent. Undoubtedly they sought advice on how to proceed from the best authorities available to them, certainly including Bernard’s
Guide to Grand-Jury Men
and possibly William Perkins’s
A Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft . . .
(1608) and John Gaule’s
Select Cases of Conscience Touching Witches and Witchcrafts
(1646). All three authors concurred on the essential points.
    William Perkins, for example, stressed that a magistrate should not “proceede upon sleight causes . . . or upon sinister respects,” but must have “speciall presumptions” before examining suspects in witchcraft cases. He listed the “certaine signes” that “at least probably, and conjecturally denote one to be a Witch,” most of which accorded with those identified by Richard Bernard and discussed earlier in this section. “Notorious defamation,” the accusation of a known