The Witches: Salem, 1692 Part 5

In her April 19 hearing Bishop had shaken her head in disbelief, grown hot under interrogation, and appealed to those in the room to clear her name. (No one volunteered.) In the case of the stolen bra.s.s, she had quarreled with testimony before a justice. Once Louder delivered up his account of the apple-scattering goblin-it left him dumb for three days!-she weighed in. Though without counsel, she had the right to question her accusers. She did not even know Louder! She was reminded that their orchards adjoined. They had quarreled over the years. Here she stumbled upon a Catch-22 of the seventeenth-century system. Self-incrimination was not yet an issue. Questioning evidence was risky. As a justice had chided an earlier suspect, his "answer was thought overbold and uncomely for a man under such apparent guilt."

Among the reheated charges against Bishop was one piece of testimony that trumped all. It happened also to be the most ancient. Seventeen years earlier, she had hired two workmen to demolish a wall of her house. Buried within it were several rag-and-bristle poppets, headless and stuck through with pins. Pressed to explain, Bishop could offer up no reasonable explanation. She made as little progress in attempting to defend herself on June 2. Urged to confess, she insisted on her innocence. The gross lying in court, the muttering and menacing, the various enchantments, the murders, the bedroom visits, were one thing. With the poppets, with the rent in her coat, with the news that Bishop bore a supernatural mark on her body, Newton had material evidence. He received a supplementary gift as well. Probably the day before the trial, as she rode under guard past the empty town house, Bishop glanced up at the stately, heavy-timbered building. A plank crashed down from an upper story, later turning up some distance away.*

The trial proceeded smoothly and swiftly. While she could challenge the choice of jurors, Bishop could not probe them for their views. In the absence of lawyers, there were no points of procedure to be discussed. There was no voir dire, no cross-examination. The justices represented both parties, interrogating the suspect as well as her accusers. Testimony went according to plan, not only because much of it had been delivered before; Bishop appeared unable to dispute or derail it. Though distressed, the bewitched girls seem to have been relatively quiet. In his account-written later, from court papers-Mather suggested there was more evil on hand than the court knew what to do with. He did not bother to describe the charges that had landed Bishop in the courtroom in the first place for a similar reason: "There was little occasion to prove the witchcraft, it being evident and notorious to all beholders."

A seventeenth-century magistrate did not hesitate to tell jurors what they thought or how to evaluate evidence. He might direct them to find a defendant guilty. In the absence of sufficient evidence, strong suspicion would do. Reputation carried great weight, which explained how so many ostensibly nongermane testimonies against Bishop wound up in court. If guilt seemed likely but not certain-"reasonable doubt" was still nearly two centuries in the future-a sentence might be adjusted accordingly. You could be convicted of a lesser crime than that for which you had been indicted. In a closing statement, Stoughton summarized the case and reminded the jury that they were to prove the evidence. He offered some instruction that June afternoon. The jurors were to disregard the girls' robust good health. Bishop's intention alone mattered. The court did not need to prove that witchcraft had been inflicted, only that it had been deployed. That, explained the sober, much-respected chief justice, was the meaning of the law. His instructions surprised at least one observer. They flew in the face of Mather's May 31 advice; in the face of Perkins, the authoritative English expert; and in the face of New England judicial history.

Stoughton likely had his verdict by midafternoon. While the jurors had no confession, they had much else. The evidence was overwhelming. Their foreman stood to announce the decision: for having practiced witchcraft on the five village girls on April 19 and "on diverse other days and times before and after," they found Bishop guilty. The goblin in the apple tree, the bedroom visits, the poppets may have done the trick. The jury convicted however for the afflictions. The ancient histories could not be corroborated. The courtroom tortures had been witnessed by all. In one of Salem's more unusual twists, the court found Bishop guilty for enchanting village girls she did not know, as opposed to the men in town she did.*

Doomed, she returned to prison, where just before four o'clock, the women submitted to a second strip search. Bishop's unnatural growth was nowhere to be found, proof that she had communicated with an evil spirit in the course of the day. All three suspects' marks had in fact mysteriously vanished. The protuberance discovered on the body of Rebecca Nurse had by afternoon deflated to a spot of dry skin. Its variation proved its diabolical origin; she had evidently suckled a demonic imp. (During her preliminary hearing, Hathorne had asked about any wounds. "I have naught but old age," the village great-grandmother had replied.) As for Susannah Martin, the tiny, contemptuous Amesbury widow, where her b.r.e.a.s.t.s had appeared full in the morning, they were lank and flattened by afternoon. She too had suckled a familiar in the course of the day. Nurse was outraged; the most practiced midwife disagreed with her colleagues. And Nurse could account for her deformities, the result of difficult labors. They had caused her trouble for years. She had not visited men's bedrooms, transformed herself into a goblin, or pried boards from public buildings with a glance. For having practiced "certain detestable arts called witchcrafts and sorceries" on four village girls, the court however indicted her on June 3.

In the village Hathorne and Corwin meanwhile continued to issue warrants and hear complaints. The Salem constable that week found a new suspect at her spinning wheel and delivered her posthaste to the authorities. Forty-year-old Ann Dolliver would have been especially easy to locate as she lodged, with her children, at the home of her father, Salem town's seventy-six-year-old senior minister, round-faced, beak-nosed John Higginson. (A Gloucester sea captain, Dolliver's husband had abandoned the family.) Dolliver was not only the daughter but also the granddaughter and great-granddaughter of ministers. The three men who signed the warrant for her arrest were her father's paris.h.i.+oners, as were her examiners. Her brother was a newly appointed magistrate. Like Abigail Hobbs, Dolliver was a wanderer, at odds with her stepmother. Long crippled by melancholy, she seemed, as one Salem resident put it, "crazed in her understanding."

Presumably out of deference to her family-a minister's daughter, she was Mrs. Dolliver in the eyes of the court-Hathorne interrogated her gently, in private. Had she ever practiced witchcraft? "Not with intent to hurt anybody" came the troubling reply. She may have been simple; she was certainly naive. She had slept in the woods late at night. She had run away from home to avoid her stepmother. After some coaxing from the girls, she revealed some additional oddities. Had she any poppets? Hathorne asked. She had two, of wax. She had made them about fourteen years earlier, when she had believed herself bewitched. She had felt the telltale pinches. (Everyone seemed to know what a witch's tweak felt like.) She read in a book that she could reverse the spell.

On the page as in person, her father was flinty and direct, a man of "soft words but hard arguments." He had forcefully expressed himself in the past, in his attacks on Quakers, on points of doctrine, an epidemic of drinking, the abuses of a royal governor, the obstreperous Salem villagers. He had had no particular use for the diabolical in his sermons, which included none of the sense of siege, the alarmist, a.s.saultive sparks that lit up a Parris or Mather performance. Six years earlier, reconciled to the fact that he would never see the five hundred pounds of back salary the town owed him, Higginson had arranged for Salem to keep the funds but provide for his adult children, an arrangement to which the town had agreed, perhaps less cheerfully than it seemed at the time. He was not the last minister in 1692 to find his daughter accused of witchcraft. Nor does he appear to have objected to the proceedings, even when they reached his doorstep. He had not a thing to say about witchcraft, despite an una.s.sailable position in his community, which he had energetically served for thirty-two years. Having jousted with Andros, having tangled with angry, obstinate Baptists, he went silent in 1692. He labored, he explained later, "under the infirmities of a decrepit old age." He made no mention of his daughter, imprisoned on June 6.

Three days later, Chief Justice Stoughton ordered the Salem sheriff to conduct Bridget Bishop on Friday, between eight o'clock and noon, to the appointed place of execution, "and there cause her to be hanged by the neck until she be dead." He was afterward to attest he had done so. The sheriff, Stoughton added-in an uncommon turn of phrase; there seemed some fear of escape-was to fail only at his peril.

AT SOME POINT on the morning of June 10 George Corwin-Justice Corwin's nephew, who was also one witchcraft judge's son-in-law and another's nephew-removed Bishop from prison. He arranged for her to travel by open, two-wheeled cart from the prison on what is today St. Peter Street, west along Ess.e.x Street, through central Salem, turning sharply north on the Boston road, a route of about fifteen minutes on foot. The idea was to dispense with the convicted witch as publicly as possible; Bishop rode to her death as an enchantress and an example. A full panoply of marshals and constables accompanied the procession as it rattled across a tidal inlet, up the steep path, and to a rocky ledge along a pasture overlooking the town. There a rope hung from a freshly installed gallows. Beyond lay a panoramic view of fields and marshes, inlets, headlands, and sparkling ocean.

No eyewitness account of the hanging survives, though plenty might have. So many had streamed to a 1659 execution of a Quaker woman that the bridge over which they returned to Boston collapsed under their weight.* The stampede to a lecture before a murderer's execution in 1686 nearly brought down the First Church gallery. Five thousand turned out for that execution, some traveling from more than fifty miles away; they began to a.s.semble a week in advance. Female malefactors were especially compelling, only more so in Bishop's case: Who doesn't care to know what a witch looks like? There had been no such execution since Mary Glover, hanged four years earlier on Boston Common for having bewitched the Goodwin children. Not only was the event so horrible as to be irresistible, but it was intended as moral instruction. It was the kind of thing to which you took the children, the well-schooled of whom learned, among other five-syllable words, "abomination," "edification," "humiliation," "mortification," "purification." A carnival atmosphere prevailed.

Ministers attended eagerly to the condemned, who on the scaffold reliably attested to the beauties of family discipline or the wisdom of the court and admonished the crowd against following in their wicked footsteps. It was not easy to rival those last-ditch expressions of remorse; a condemned pirate's regret that he had scorned his parents, embraced vice, and entangled himself with foul company made an impression. A witch merited no such treatment, however. She offered no stirring lessons in deterrence, no soul-purifying shame. Meanwhile the onlookers ached with suspense. In her final minutes would she at least confess?

Under the gallows, an officer of the court read Bishop's death warrant. Had she anything to say? She insisted on her innocence even as she climbed the ladder. There was to be no tidy satisfaction like that offered by a Connecticut witch who-repenting for her sins-"died in a frame extremely to the satisfaction of them that were spectators of it." (She was the first New Englander to confess to a devil's pact.) Though not her minister, at her request John Hale seems to have offered a few last words at the foot of the gallows. A Salem shopkeeper scoffed that were he asked to pray at her execution, he would not do so; Hale heard the comment as a reproach. No doubt speaking for many, the shopkeeper excoriated Bishop. She had covenanted with the devil. He would happily have testified against her. (His wife had.) We do not know if Parris was present, although it is difficult to believe that any local minister could have absented himself, much less one who had signed four indictments against Bishop. Many of her accusers stood in the crowd, along with at least some of the bewitched girls and much of the village. A few unexpected parties turned up as well. A Salem matron watched the devil help George Jacobs up to a perch on the gallows. Mary Walcott saw Jacobs too; he beat her with his spectral walking sticks. The members of the court were themselves in Boston, at a meeting of the governor's council.

We know nothing of Bishop's last words, of who tied her skirts around her ankles or her hands behind her back, who urged her up the ladder, placed the cloth over her head, or fitted the noose around her neck. Hangmen were not easy to come by. Sheriff Corwin may himself have delivered the push that left her suspended by the neck, thras.h.i.+ng desperately, twitching spasmodically, finally dangling, still and silent, in midair. She died by slow strangulation; the end could have taken as long as an hour. It was not necessarily quiet. It could be preceded by bloodcurdling groans and-in one case-a shocking request: Having hung for some time, a 1646 malefactor asked what her executioners proposed to do next. Someone stepped forward "and turned the knot of the rope backward, and then she soon died." In New York a year earlier, the condemned was still alive when he was cut down from the gallows. The blow of an ax finished the job. Agonized cries went up from the spectators; at a later hanging, the screeches as the body dropped could be heard a mile away. Afterward it swayed in the air for some time, the crowd dispersing slowly. Bishop's could be seen across the fields for miles around and from the far side of Salem town. She died before noon; Corwin arranged for the corpse to be buried nearby, a detail he added to his report and later crossed out, presumably as he had exceeded his instructions. It is difficult to imagine who might have claimed the body. Bishop's husband appears to have absented himself from the scene. From an earlier marriage, she had a twenty-five-year-old daughter, who could only have kept her distance that season.

Across both Salems, villagers and townsfolk breathed a collective sigh of relief. They had dispatched a nuisance and a notorious sinner. Together they had engaged in a cathartic, calming ritual. They had discharged their fear; there would be no more confounding bedroom intrusions. As would be observed much later, such things were "painful, grotesque, but a scandal was after all a sort of service to the community." The wise magistrates whose praises Mather sang in his charter-selling sermon-the authorities who were to clear the woods of Indians and the sea of pirates-were on their way to clearing the air of evil; the charter enjoined those men to "kill, slay, destroy, and conquer" anyone who attempted to invade or annoy Ma.s.sachusetts. Wrongs were righted and reason returned-in one case, quite literally. A decade earlier Bishop had pried a woman from her bed and nearly drowned her. The woman was thereafter insane, "a vexation to herself and all about her." With Bishop's arrest, her condition improved. And as Bishop swung from the gallows, the woman miraculously emerged from her decade of madness. The execution worked a spell of its own over Ess.e.x County, where-Mather would note-many "marvelously recovered their senses." Accusations ceased over the next weeks, as did arrests. The girls appeared symptom-free, the jailed witches incapacitated. Both Salems had reason to believe themselves safe.

One other person might have as well. The day after Bishop's execution, five hundred Wabanaki and French descended upon Wells, Maine, with shouts, shots, and flaming arrows, "a formidable crew of dragons, coming with open mouth upon them, to swallow them up at a mouthful," as Mather later described it. Over two days a band of fifteen men managed to hold off the attackers. The Wabanaki all the same made off with a captive. In full view of the settlers, just beyond musket range, they stripped, scalped, and castrated him, slicing open his fingers and toes and inserting burning coals under the skin before leaving him to die. George Burroughs was spared that sight and the horrific, two-day siege of his paris.h.i.+oners, safe as he was in the eternal dark of Boston's dungeon.

The remainder of the summer was, Mather noted in his diary at some indeterminate point later in the year, "a very doleful time, unto the whole country."

VII.

NOW THEY SAY THERE IS ABOVE SEVEN HUNDRED IN ALL.

Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little.

-SAMUEL JOHNSON GOVERNOR PHIPS SPOKE accurately when he hailed the Salem justices as the best and brightest. Well-read, widely traveled, they were men of integrity, familiar with the workings of the court, an inevitable stop on the way to a New England fortune.* Many had handed down unpopular decisions. Several had witnessed trials in London. They lived in the finest brick mansions and gabled homes in their respective towns. The burden of proof rested on the prosecution, but the prosecution enjoyed a few seventeenth-century advantages. An English trial of the time was inquisitorial, an informal, free-form, hectic, rapid-fire contest best described as "a relatively spontaneous bicker between accusers and accused." Across the board, standards of proof were imprecise. A suspect had no idea of the evidence against her until she stepped into the courtroom, where she could be convicted of a different crime than the one for which she stood indicted. She had the right to defend herself but no guarantee she would be heard. Protests of innocence carried little weight. "I am no thief," a defendant in a larceny case insisted two generations later. "You must prove that," replied the judge. A valued legal treatise recommended deposing the defendant's adversaries, for such people "will pry very narrowly into everything." As only witnesses for the prosecution testified under oath, their word carried greater weight. Hearsay was perfectly acceptable, which explained how-at Bishop's trial-Samuel Shattuck could testify about a stranger who divined that Bishop had bewitched a child. That was the guest who insisted a quarrelsome witch lived nearby. Only then did Shattuck recall a tense encounter between his wife and Bishop, who had stalked off, muttering. Soon afterward, Shattuck's son fell ill. The stranger had acted no differently from the fortune-teller who intuits that you have recently suffered a setback; she is unfailingly correct. Witchcraft merely supplied the culprit, sometimes in advance of her crime, often many years later. There was in 1692 a certain amount of relitigating ancient offenses. It was not a summer when you wanted to appear in your neighbor's dreams.

No fewer than five men sat in judgment over Bridget Bishop. We can be certain of the ident.i.ties of only three. They did not hear the case the same way. All had graduated from Harvard, approximately a decade apart. Each had opted for a more secular career than the one for which he had been educated.* Amiable, heavyset Samuel Sewall was the only one of the three courteous enough to leave a diary. Salem witchcraft was something one talked of endlessly but wrote about very little; Sewall made no entries over the month of June, remaining silent until mid-July. He would write more expansively on Salem later. The kind of father who devoted his morning to a teenager's spiritual crisis, Sewall worried always that he did "much harm and little good," an equation he struggled to invert. He shrank from the censure of friends; he was appalled in 1701 when, at the top of his lungs, Cotton Mather excoriated him-Mather could be heard from the street-in a bookstore. (Sewall the next day attempted to placate his irate friend with a fine haunch of venison. He failed.) He wrote even a cordial dunning letter. He compared himself unfavorably to his mother-in-law. Sewall moved at a deliberate pace; with reason, colleagues accused him of temporizing. He did not naturally oppose authority, something that on occasion also discomfited him. He had been displeased with himself for having bowed to pressure when-his dear friend and fellow witchcraft justice Wait Still Winthrop forcing his hand-agreed at the last minute to reprieve a pirate. Never before had he adjudicated a witchcraft case.

Two days after Bishop's hanging, Sewall took his place in the pews of Boston's Old South Church for Samuel Willard's afternoon sermon. Several other justices joined him there. The son of one of Ma.s.sachusetts's founding families, Wait Still Winthrop, sat nearby, as did Peter Sergeant. What Willard had to say that afternoon both rea.s.sured and disturbed. Taking 1 Peter 5:8 as his text, he reminded his congregants that they were to be sober-minded and watchful. The devil ranged among them, eager to pounce. He reserved his greatest malice for the pious. Willard confirmed Mather's millennial note; the fiend was at his most violent when his time was short. The devil, noted Willard, could represent anyone he pleased; he required no pact. Willard appealed for charity and compa.s.sion. Some matters, he held, should be left to divine adjudication.

That possibility-that one might well work witchcraft without having consented, much less contracted, to do so-struck Chief Justice Stoughton as unlikely. The eldest of the three Harvard-educated judges, sixty-year-old Stoughton demonstrated a gift for extracting himself from controversies that tended to sink lesser men. Far steelier than Sewall, he knew a great deal about law enforcement. Ma.s.sachusetts legal code carefully and clearly enumerated crimes but could be opaque regarding court procedures. On the one hand, leniency was preferred. On the other hand, offenses that undermined society as a whole demanded swift prosecution. And the province faced a crisis of unprecedented proportions. Never before had it suffered a witchcraft epidemic. Even those unsympathetic to the Puritan establishment were astonished. To a half-amused New York Anglican, it seemed as if Cotton Mather had been prescient two years earlier when he had warned that Satan schemed to wrench the colony from Puritan hands. The devil indeed now seemed on the verge of depopulating Ma.s.sachusetts. There were over one hundred suspects in jail, most of them church members, elders, and deacons, reported the New Yorker. A minister rotted in prison, as did another's daughter. The wife of a third had been named. The wretches betrayed one another so quickly that "now they say there is above seven hundred in all." (That was untrue, although it was true that more witches were jailed than had been convicted in all the years of New England history combined.) To someone like Stoughton, it seemed as if everything in which he believed stood in jeopardy. That fear galloped across New England. On June 22, Connecticut established a witchcraft court to address an epidemic of its own.

Enforcing the laws of New England qualified as a sacred duty. The justices approached it scrupulously, consulting authoritative legal texts and following the letter of the law. Some dissension nonetheless arose among the ranks. Within days of Bishop's hanging, fifty-three-year-old Nathaniel Saltonstall, the third Harvard-educated justice, resigned from the Court of Oyer and Terminer. An Ipswich native, the grandson of an early Bay Colony leader, Saltonstall sat regularly on the Ma.s.sachusetts bench. He had lobbied in London on New England's behalf alongside Increase Mather. A highly popular militia captain, he had served on the Maine frontier. Principles had tripped him up before and may have done so again; in 1687 he had refused to cooperate with Andros, an offense for which he spent fifteen days in prison. It is unclear if Saltonstall caviled with the Bishop verdict or the execution. An observer later allowed simply that "he has left the court, and is very much dissatisfied with the proceedings of it." He was not replaced.

Although he excused himself from the court, Saltonstall does not seem to have offered a public statement. When you questioned the proceedings, specters had a habit of a.s.suming your shape; it was a short step from urging caution to fending off accusation. Already Mather peered nervously over his shoulder, wondering when the devil would begin to masquerade in his guise. (It would not be long.) An Andover constable would balk at further arrests, dubious about the charges; he landed in prison. Indeed, within the year, a report of Saltonstall's specter began to circulate. More than ever it was true that-as Baxter had it, paraphrasing Luke, in a line Parris would adapt-"If you are not for Christ and his works, you are against him."

Skepticism tended to burst forth, execute a few mincing steps, then burrow underground, spooked by its shadow. No one pointed out that thirty-six-year-old Sarah Bibber-whom the spectral Burroughs had accompanied to his hearing and who now writhed alongside the girls-was a known scandalmonger, double-tongued and mischief-making. On no front were lips more suddenly pursed than when it came to countersuits. Prior to 1692, defamation had represented a lively New England business. In one of the earliest Ma.s.sachusetts witchcraft proceedings, a woman received twenty lashes for calling another a witch. The Salem woman of whom it had been said that "she was a witch and if she were not a witch already she would be one and therefore it was as good to hang her at first as last" sued successfully for defamation. Often the cases pitted men against each other, one having lobbed an accusation at the other's wife. Susannah Martin's husband had filed and won a defamation suit after her 1669 witchcraft trial.

Francis Nurse had sued successfully both for defamation and slander. He brought no such action in 1692, when it might too easily have misfired. What prevailed instead was Mather's admonition that "if the neighbor of an elected saint sins, then the saint sins also." There was no odium attached to delivering up your fellow villager; in 1692 it was better to accuse than be suspected of complicity. To fail to report an offense const.i.tuted an offense of its own. Moreover, by informing, you did your part for the community. Hostile words that had earlier produced slander suits seemed in 1692 diverted to witchcraft accusations.

A rustle of doubt all the same made itself felt. Three days after Bishop's execution, Phips met with his council, which included Chief Justice Stoughton. They requested some guidance. Over the next days, twelve ministers conferred. Cotton Mather drafted their joint reply, delivered on June 15. While pages seemed to issue from Mather in his sleep, "The Return of Several Ministers Consulted" was a circ.u.mspect, eight-paragraph doc.u.ment over which he labored.* In two paragraphs Mather acknowledged the enormity of the crisis and issued a paean to good government. In two more he urged "exquisite caution." He addressed procedural issues: The courtroom should be as quiet and neutral as possible. Susceptible as they were to abuse by the "devil's legerdemains," practices like the touch test should be deployed carefully. The same went for the evil eye, by no means infallible. Yet again Mather held up English authorities Perkins and Bernard as the gold standard. He sounded a more tentative note than he had two weeks earlier in his discursive letter to John Richards.

In the lines that surely received the greatest scrutiny, Mather reminded the justices that convictions should not rest purely on spectral evidence, to which only the enchanted were privy. He had said as much already; he would insist on the point through the summer. Other considerations must weigh against the suspected witch, "inasmuch as 'tis an undoubted and a notorious thing" that a devil might impersonate an innocent, even a virtuous, man. In a contorted penultimate paragraph, Mather wondered if the entire calamity might be resolved were the court to discount those very testimonies. With a sweeping "nevertheless"-a word that figured in every 1692 Mather witchcraft statement-he then executed an about-face. His "very critical and exquisite caution" became, five paragraphs later, a vote for a "speedy and vigorous prosecution." The ministers endorsed the prosecution of those who had "rendered themselves obnoxious, according to the direction given in the laws of G.o.d, and the wholesome statutes of the English nation, for the detection of witchcrafts." Equivocal though he remained, Mather came down emphatically on two points: Their case was extraordinary. The New England magistrate was no less so. Mather would apologize several times for his incoherence on a devilish subject.

Other clergymen were more cogent. In June a Baptist preacher named William Milborne submitted two pet.i.tions to the Ma.s.sachusetts General a.s.sembly. Milborne had preached for some time in Saco, Maine; Burroughs's plight may have occasioned his protest. (In all ways, one had to be wary of one's friends. Milborne's defense may have encouraged the idea that Burroughs was a Baptist, considered heretics and nearly as dangerous as Quakers.) "Several persons of good fame and of unspotted reputation," Milborne pointed out, were jailed on witchcraft charges. They had committed imaginary crimes. He urged the justices to discount specious evidence; they stood in grave danger of convicting innocents. Milborne had come to the ministry with a legal degree and a background in whaling. He was also a known troublemaker who hailed from a family of troublemakers. He tussled with both congregants and political authorities.*

Phips ordered Milborne's arrest, yet another acknowledgment of the churning tide in 1692; the two had previously been allies, having made common cause with common friends. Milborne had helped foment the rebellion against Andros. On June 25, the minister found himself summoned to explain his "seditious and scandalous papers." For his potent "reflections upon the administrations of public justice," the court offered him his choice between jail and a crus.h.i.+ng two-hundred-pound bond. Cotton Mather had bought his home and a tract of land for the same sum. Milborne was not heard from again. Two days after his arrest-by which time it was clear the New England ministers might differ from the magistrates but would entrust witchcraft to their better judgment-the Court of Oyer and Terminer called its next eight suspects.

THE PURITAN MINISTER in an apocalyptic frame of mind, the Crown prosecutor preparing his case, and the Ma.s.sachusetts farmer pondering the sudden death of his cow all engaged in the same exercise. Mind quickening, pulse hammering, each went into a.n.a.lytic overdrive. How to make sense of the ominous and inexplicable without clobbering the dog that was really a child? Rummaging about for the pattern that had to be there somewhere, he ventured into the coincidence-free sector between faith and paranoia, both invested in global, half-visible designs. And he did so as only a fundamentalist, a prosecutor, or an adolescent will: with the heady conviction that he was incontestably, blindingly right.

No other witchcraft suspect could rival Bridget Bishop for supernatural activity or bedroom disturbances. One other could account for yellow birds, cats, stalking wolves. Five confessed witches-including her own daughter-had named her. Her husband noted the strange mark on her shoulder. She had suckled a familiar on her finger. Her name turned up in the devil's book. She had ridden on a pole to the parsonage meadow for Burroughs's "h.e.l.lish meeting." On a fresh sheet of paper, Thomas Newton outlined his case against Sarah Good, the Salem beggar, noting with satisfaction that the testimony of the bewitched and the confessors regarding the witches' Sabbath conformed. Newton relied on a detailed abstract he had made of t.i.tuba's account, tidy in its cause and effect: Good visited the parsonage. She mumbled under her breath. The children fell ill. Moreover, only their victims and their confederates could see the witches. Good had seen Osborne, whose powers did not level her. Good, reasoned the attorney general, "must consequently be a witch." The pieces fit together seamlessly.

The call for jurors had hardly gone out when Sarah Good began afflicting again. On June 28 Susannah Shelden contorted before the grand jury to whom she submitted testimony that, as recently as two days earlier, Good had p.r.i.c.ked, pinched, and nearly choked her to death. Good had lashed her hands together so tightly that two men had had to rescue her; they understood it was the fourth time in two weeks the eighteen-year-old had found her wrists bound. It was on one such occasion that the broom had wound up in the apple tree; between fits, Shelden told of invisible hands that had stolen a saucer from the table. She had watched Good carry it outside. The Procters' maid also writhed before the grand jurors; Shelden explained that Good a.s.saulted her. Under oath Sarah Bibber swore that Good had bewitched her four-year-old. Parris swore to the sufferings of the girls during the March preliminary hearing. The grand jury handed down at least three indictments against Good, whose trial began immediately. Although she was about Bibber's age, she looked decrepit. For weeks already her clothes had been in shreds. If earlier she had mumbled like a witch, she had come to resemble one. She had been in jail since February with a nursing child, and, for some length of time, with the dying Osborne.

Good tended to seize opportunities to speak her mind, a reason she stood before a panel of black-gowned justices in the first place. It is more likely that she entered a screed into the record than a hopeless, halfhearted denial. A guilty plea at this juncture would in any event have accomplished little. Between the girls' flailing and the mountain of evidence, her arraignment and trial extended over two days. At its end, the jury delivered a guilty verdict. It little surprised one Boston observer, who commented on the formulaic, one-size-fits-all approach in Salem. As he saw it, "The same evidence that served for one would serve for all the rest."

Neither John Hale nor Deodat Lawson, both present, wrote about Sarah Good. Nor did Cotton Mather. A burden to her community, a menace and a malcontent, she was not noteworthy. The case against her was largely spectral. The two accused witches who followed-over the course of the week the grand jury heard eight cases and the trial jury five-interested Mather more. No confederate had implicated Susannah Martin, the tart-tongued, seventy-one-year-old Amesbury woman who had scoffed at the idea that the girls were bewitched, suggesting that they practiced black magic themselves. Martin had stood accused once already for witchcraft, however. Evidence suggested that in the course of Bishop's trial, she had nursed an imp. As in that case, Newton could appeal not only to the bewitched girls but to a procession of afflicted men as well. Constables located a dozen in all. They had no need to resort to fits to express themselves, testifying straightforwardly, persuasively, and without interruption.

Martin too pestered men in their beds. She bit fingers and transformed herself into a black hog. She specialized in animals; the justices heard of drowned oxen, crazed cows, blighted cattle, flying puppies, dogs transformed into kegs, killer cats. Martin made sense of other oddities as well, having had several decades to do so. Over two years, a Salisbury man had been carried about by demons. For six months of that time, they rendered him mute. He now swore that at their h.e.l.lish meetings, meetings at which he was offered a book to sign in exchange for "all the delectable things, persons, and places that he could imagine," he had seen Martin. A fifty-three-year-old who many years earlier could not find his way home one Sat.u.r.day night-although he was but three miles away and walking in bright moonlight-attributed his disorientation to Martin. Just beyond her field he stumbled into a ditch that he knew full well was not there.

Susannah Martin had quibbled over church seating. She drove a hard bargain. She exchanged cross words with her brother-in-law. She scorned those who had testified against her in 1669, as many colorfully recalled. When a Salisbury carpenter allowed in the course of that trial that he believed her to be a witch, Martin had promised "that some she-devil would shortly fetch him away." The killer cat had pounced the next night, lunging at his throat as he lay in bed. After a Salisbury woman had appeared before the earlier grand jury, Martin startled her while she was out milking the cow. "For thy defaming me at court," she swore, "I'll make thee the miserablest creature in the world." Two months later, out of the blue, the woman began to spew nonsense. Physicians declared her bewitched, as she remained for two decades.*

It is difficult to say which came first: Was Martin, like Bridget Bishop, strident because she had stood trial previously, or had she stood trial previously because she was strident? Witchcraft inscribed a vicious circle, its allegation generating witchlike behavior. There appeared no other response to an accusation than a malediction, which explained at least some of Martin's unminced words. Singled out earlier, she attracted charges; 1692 was a good time to revive old ones. Once questions arise we sift for answers. And when it comes to blame, none of us draws a blank; only after Bridget Bishop told the miller's son of the rumors swirling around her did odd things begin to happen to him. We have no record of what Martin said-to her accusers or the magistrates-on June 29, though she remained defiant throughout the proceedings. "Her chief plea," Cotton Mather noted, based on pages lost to us, "was that she had led a most virtuous and holy life." That struck him as blasphemous. The jurors agreed, returning a guilty verdict. Months later, the court doc.u.ments in hand, Mather offered the last word on Susannah Martin, whom he had not met and no longer could: "This woman was one of the most impudent, scurrilous, wicked creatures in the world."

Two other cases that week turned on natural grudges and preternatural pranks. The evidence against Topsfield's Elizabeth How featured a full collection of fairy-tale marvels: leaping pigs, poisoned turnips, self-emptying vessels, dissolving fence posts, amnesia-inducing apples. Her case differed from Martin's in two crucial respects. The ox sacrificed to the turnip belonged to one brother-in-law, the leaping sow to another. When named in May, Elizabeth How had applied to the first brother-in-law for a.s.sistance. Might he accompany her to Salem? Her blind husband could not make the trip; she had no desire to go alone. She too discovered how difficult it was to outrun the cloud of suspicion that, once raised, wafted about the neighborhood. For any other reason he would readily accompany her, the in-law replied. Here he drew the line. He bargained with her: "If you are a witch, tell me how long you have been a witch and what mischief you have done and then I will go with you." The next day his sow leaped three to four feet in the early-evening air, "turning about, squeaking, falling, and dying."

In his account of her trial Cotton Mather did not note a significant advantage fifty-five-year-old Elizabeth How had over the previous suspects: No fewer than twelve people testified in her defense, two ministers among them. She had never been anything other than a good Christian, faithful in her promises, just in her dealings, pious in her beliefs. Her husband's family did not abandon her entirely; her ninety-four-year-old father-in-law described her devotion to his blind son, whom she gently led about by the hand. She tended their farm. She cared for their six children. An Ipswich shoemaker testified that How spoke no ill of her accusers, who she thought harmed themselves more than they did her. All kinds of alarm bells sounded in the How testimony. The Rowley a.s.sistant minister took it upon himself to join How on a visit to a ten-year-old girl whom she had allegedly bewitched. The child said nothing of her, in her convulsions or afterward. She managed even to take How's hand in the minister's presence. Had she hurt her? "No, never," replied the child. The minister later sat outdoors with the girl. From an upstairs window her brother called down: "Say Goodwife How is a witch, say she is a witch!"

The Salem jurors heard of enchanted hay and bewitched rope when Sarah Wilds came before them the same day. Her case prominently featured malicious relatives. She had been an easy target, arriving too promptly in a family that still mourned Wilds's previous wife. Though confined to the home, women were the geographically mobile ones in New England; they were the strangers who came to town. The Topsfield constable had weeks earlier rounded up and delivered the Hobbses to Salem; he was Wilds's son. "I have had serious thoughts many times since," twenty-eight-year-old Ephraim Wilds told the court, "whether my seizing of them might not be some cause of her thus accusing my mother." Retaliation seemed likely; in arresting Hobbs, he "almost saw revenge in her face, she looked so maliciously on me." At a time when it still seemed possible to walk out of court with a reprieve, How and Wilds no doubt insisted on their innocence. Generally the courtroom rejoinders seem to have fallen somewhere between Joan of Arc's straight-spined "People have been hung for telling the truth before now," and Dorothy's wide-eyed, back-in-Kansas "Doesn't anybody believe me?" No demonic Sabbaths or diabolical pacts figured among the charges against either woman. Both had defenders. Wilds was a full church member. Flying pigs, bewitched hay, and misbehaving scythes made indelible impressions, however. The jury found both women guilty of witchcraft.

Mather elected not to write of another case tried that Wednesday or of a suspect to whom the adjectives "impudent, scurrilous, and wicked" had never been applied. No one had accused Rebecca Nurse of witchcraft before 1692. She had never so much as appeared in court. Nor since the arrival of the marshal on her doorstep, weeks earlier, had anyone launched as concerted a defense as the large and influential Nurse clan. Theirs was a family in which brothers-in-law rode to the rescue rather than prodding the accused to confess to witchcraft. Francis Nurse had energetically canva.s.sed the village, riding door to door with a pet.i.tion a.s.serting that his wife was, as she had claimed in March-five girls and two grown women flailing about her-as innocent "as the child unborn." Thirty-nine villagers signed Nurse's pet.i.tion, although it did nothing to free his wife from jail or exempt her from two brutal physical examinations. Samuel Sibley, husband of the witch-cake baker, signed, as did seven Putnams (including one of Nurse's original accusers), the father of an afflicted eleven-year-old, and three of the four church members who had called on Nurse to tell her of her plight, a group that included Justice Hathorne's sister. (Parris remained staunchly on the other side, his niece among the four signatories to the indictments.) No case so sharply divided the community.*

Francis Nurse launched a more targeted offensive as well. On June 29 the jury heard evidence not only against his wife but also her accusers. A villager swore that Dr. Griggs's maid had lied about having attended meeting the previous month. Having sat at Rebecca's bedside over the previous weeks, a neighbor pointed out several inconsistencies in Susannah Shelden's story. The witches had hauled Susannah through the gra.s.s and over stone walls on her belly, like a snake. No; she had surmounted the wall herself. She had flown on a pole to Boston. No; the devil had carried her through the air. A Beverly couple who had employed the Putnams' maid several years earlier observed that the nineteen-year-old enjoyed an arm's-length relations.h.i.+p with the truth. Francis Nurse had no trouble discrediting spiteful Sarah Bibber; for all the love of her neighbors, she sounds like someone who, had she not joined the girls, would have been accused of witchcraft herself. She had a testy relations.h.i.+p with her husband. She wished her child ill. She spoke obscenely; she had long taken to falling into fits when crossed. Three different villagers denounced her as an "unruly, turbulent spirit." The resolute Nurses corroborated what witchcraft allegations tended to prove: No one was misdemeanor-free.

The case against Rebecca Nurse was thin on the occult; her husband did his best to tug the supernatural rug wholly out from under it. The parents of an alleged victim testified that their child's death was due purely to "a malignant fever." They entertained no witchcraft suspicions. Nathaniel Putnam, who had waged an interminable battle against the Nurses over their neighboring lands, testified in Rebecca's defense, although his nephew had pressed the initial charges. Putnam had known the pious great-grandmother for years. She had raised and educated a good and G.o.dly family. While she had differed with neighbors, he had never heard a whisper regarding sorcery. The defendant did what she could to return common sense to the scene. Before the court reconvened, she submitted a request. She had endured two invasive physical examinations. The experienced woman on that panel-"the most ancient, skillful prudent person of them all"-had disagreed with the rest. Might the authorities dispatch a professional? Nurse suggested a few names. Two of her daughters confirmed that their mother had been troubled for years by complications from childbirth, though "the jury of women seem to be afraid it should be something else."

In the jittery courtroom the girls impressed their infirmities on the jury. Already pins punctured their lips, in one case binding them together; Ann Putnam plucked another from her hand at the How hearing. During Rebecca Nurse's trial, Sarah Bibber clasped her hands to her knees and howled in pain: the witch had p.r.i.c.ked her! Unfortunately Nurse's daughter had kept an eye on Bibber; she saw her pull pins from her clothing and jab herself. At one point court officers escorted Abigail and Deliverance Hobbs into the room. Nurse knew the Topsfield mother and daughter from prison. What were they doing there? she asked, startled. The question would return to haunt her. And it did nothing to derail the account of the occult Sabbath at which Nurse had officiated, seated, a.s.serted Parris's niece, in the place of honor, at the devil's side.

Some discreet backpedaling took place. Ann Putnam Sr. figured among Nurse's original accusers. She had disputed Scripture with the spectral Nurse in Deodat Lawson's presence. Ann's husband had carried her out of Nurse's March hearing, at which Ann had gone stiff as a plank. She was nowhere near the Salem courtroom that Wednesday. Nurse's case involved no flying apples and, at best, one malediction: she had railed against a wandering pig. The family had stature in the community; there was a solid sliver of hope. After a short deliberation-the suspect presumably remained in the courtroom, dimly aware of the clamor and clatter around her-the jury returned to their seats. Stoughton called for their verdict. It sent a ripple of astonishment through the room. Standing, the foreman declared the defendant not guilty. Any cries of relief on the part of the Nurse clan were drowned out by the accusers, who erupted in hideous roars. An echo rose to meet them from outside. Not everyone had expected the Nurses to prevail, least of all the judges, who made their irritation known. One openly declared himself disappointed. Another swore to re-indict Nurse, as he well could.

Stoughton turned to the jurors. He had no intention of imposing his opinions on them. But had they duly considered Nurse's reaction to Deliverance Hobbs? At the sight of her, the prisoner had let slip something along the lines of "She is one of us," always loaded words. Hobbs was by her own admission a witch. With that remark, had Nurse not acknowledged, Stoughton wondered, that she was one too? Perhaps that was a confession they had heard? (Judges did not hesitate to question jury decisions, although they more often challenged, and commuted, convictions. It was exceedingly rare for one to question an acquittal.) Distressed by the pandemonium they had created, the jurors asked to re-deliberate. It is impossible to know how the strain felt to the Nurse family, much less to the stunned, half-deaf defendant, an invalid well before her nine weeks in prison.

Behind closed doors the jury did its best to pa.r.s.e Rebecca Nurse's outburst. Had she meant that she and Hobbs were fellow prisoners or fellow witches? The twelve men could not agree; the court awaited not only a decision but a unanimous one. The foreman remained mystified. "I could not tell how to take her words," he afterward explained. By themselves, they did not appear to incriminate. The jurors rea.s.sumed their seats for some clarification. Nurse stood at the bar. The foreman repeated the baffling line to her. As recorded, she had asked: "What? Do these persons give in evidence against me now? They used to come among us." What exactly, he asked, had Nurse meant? She stood silently, in an unresponsive daze. The jury waited for but received no elucidation, "whereupon," the sixty-year-old foreman revealed days later, "these words were to me a princ.i.p.al evidence against her." For a third time the jury deliberated. They handed Stoughton a guilty verdict.

Francis Nurse pressed them: What could account for their reversal after twelve men had agreed they had insufficient evidence to convict? And Rebecca Nurse explained herself soon enough, having conferred with someone familiar with the law. She submitted a paper to the court; she had intended nothing by her remark other than that the Hobbs women were her fellow prisoners. She had been taken aback. How could accused criminals provide legal evidence against another? (They could, as accomplices.) She may have meant only that the two women-with whom she had shared every minute of a shameful, terrifying incarceration-were her friends. It had not occurred to her that her remark could be interpreted differently. As for her silence, she was, she reminded the magistrates, "hard of hearing, and full of grief." Not having grasped that they had misconstrued her words, she had had no opportunity to set the matter straight. Even at her March examination she had had difficulty understanding precisely what was asked, hardly the first defendant to report as much. (Of course she had not heard the magistrates, sneered her accusers. The devil whispered at her ear!) She remained deaf not only to the proceedings but to any nuance in her statement. From the jury's point of view, she had baldly incriminated herself.

Francis Nurse lost no time in requesting the court transcripts. Sewall provided what he could. Some testimony was oral, as Hobbs's must have been; Sewall had nothing on paper. His wife's statement and the villagers' signatures in hand, Nurse prepared a fresh appeal, pet.i.tioning Governor Phips for a reprieve. Meanwhile Reverend Noyes arranged for Rebecca to make another public appearance. The following Sunday, he brought her to the meetinghouse in which she had prayed for decades. It was a communion day; the portly, stiff-necked minister had a full house. Should a convicted witch remain a member of the congregation? Phrased as such, the answer was entirely obvious. It was the church's G.o.dly duty to purify their ranks; Nurse defiled them all with her crimes. After the sacrament, with a unanimous show of hands, the Salem congregation voted to issue a formal sentence of excommunication, something of a rarity by 1692. It carried no legal ramifications; a paris.h.i.+oner was excommunicated for trampling the laws of G.o.d, not man. Under normal circ.u.mstances the penalty was temporary. A sinner could repent, be absolved of his sin, and rejoin the parish. A witch could not.

On the afternoon of July 3 the Salem elders a.s.sumed their seats before the congregation, the deacons in the first rows. Nurse stood in the center aisle, chained. Her minister p.r.o.nounced her an unclean person, an admonition that could be lengthy and that detailed her offenses all over again. He then delivered some version of the vituperative sentence handed to Ann Hibbins and Anne Hutchinson a half century earlier: "I do here and in the name of Christ Jesus and His Church deliver you up to Satan and to his power and working." The sentence was a dreadful one; the shame for a woman whose life had revolved around her faith, whose neighbors now reviled her as a witch, whose two sisters lay in chains in Boston, would have been excruciating, the more so as Noyes did vituperation well. He barred Nurse from the congregation, a formality given her current prison address though an insult to her crusading husband, who had demonstrated that many in no way shunned his wife. The fragile seventy-one-year-old who had a.s.sured her March callers that she felt closer to the Almighty in her sickness than she did in good health was henceforth to withdraw herself, like a leper, from the parish. She would never again be allowed to take communion. Noyes consigned her soul to everlasting h.e.l.l.

THE COURT OF Oyer and Terminer proceeded with all five late-June suspects as they had with Bridget Bishop three weeks earlier. In the intervening weeks, the justices had hanged a witch and solicited counsel; the ministers submitted their recommendations. Where they warned against "noise, company, and openness," the Salem town house reverberated with cries. The clergy denounced the touch test and the evil eye. They expressed doubt about spectral evidence, a matter that continued to preoccupy them; late in June, as the court reconvened, the Ma.s.sachusetts ministers settled on that question for their late-summer meeting. Might the devil disguise himself as an innocent in order to work his diabolical art? If he could, those who afflicted did so involuntarily. The judges meanwhile had moved on. Ultimately the clergymen's counsel carried as much weight as the remark of a young citizen who preferred the evidence before his eyes to the wisdom of the crowd. The emperor, cried the little boy, wore no clothes! Indeed he did not. But he stiffened his spine as his procession continued, a page holding high the imaginary, multicolored mantle.

A Puritan minister appeared black in dress from head to toe; plenty of somber suits graced the Salem courtroom. Deodat Lawson returned for some portion of the June trials. A Watertown minister-he happened to be Jonathan Corwin's stepson-made the trip to Salem to observe the extraordinary events. He left utterly flummoxed. The only lessons he could extract were to tread gently and demonstrate great care for those around him. Parris was in the courtroom daily. He and John Hale testified against both Topsfield witches, Sarah Wilds and Elizabeth How. Noyes was unlikely to have missed a session; for weeks he had interrogated witnesses, gathered evidence, and challenged testimony. Along with pin-wielding Sarah Bibber, the girls held the room rapt; they continued to be "struck dumb, deaf, blind, and sometimes lay as if they were dead for a while," noted an observer. The eyeb.a.l.l.s rolling back in the heads, the flailing limbs made all acts of malfeasance seem plausible. By June the bewitched were themselves instruments in more expert hands, however; the narrative had swallowed them up. They could be sidelined or corrected. The bench openly reprimanded one girl for lying. Another accused Samuel Willard, minister to three of the justices, a signatory to Mather's June 15 letter, and among the most respected men in Boston. Over the searingly hot, uncommonly dry summer, Willard preached a cycle of sermons on the devil. He expertly elicited false confessions and conjured false reports; his quarry might be oblivious to-and therefore innocent of-the abuse. Willard's point was unmistakable. His reward was to be accused of witchcraft. The bench dismissed his accuser from court, letting it be known that the girl "was mistaken in the person."

As was clear from Rebecca Nurse's short-lived acquittal, jurors arrived freely at their decision. The afflicted indeed shrieked in response. But it was the bench that officially frowned on the verdict. And it was the chief justice who stepped in to ask if those twelve upstanding men might have overlooked a clue. He drew their attention to crucial bits of evidence. He may well have interpreted Nurse's silence for them; it was in his power to elicit a response from the bewildered defendant, whom he did not pursue. His disapproval weighed heavily on the jurors, much in the thrall of "the honored court" to which they submitted their decision. There was no question to whom the Salem courtroom belonged.

Sixty-year-old William Stoughton a.s.sumed the ego-trampling, alibi-crus.h.i.+ng role of John Hathorne, a decade his junior. To the job Stoughton brought more judicial experience than anyone in the province. As deputy governor, he was second only to Phips in the new administration. Pale and long-faced, with a high forehead, deep-set eyes, and a collection of chins, he was among the court's eldest members. A fine orator, persuasive and widely admired, he summed up evidence for the jurors at trial's end and issued their instructions. We have no sense of Stoughton's voice, though we know it impressed his peers. Presumably he spoke with the harsh, high-pitched sc.r.a.pe of New England. Whether one desired a speedy and vigorous prosecution, to resolve a dispute over the location of a meetinghouse, to effect a prisoner exchange with the Wabanaki, or to discipline an obstreperous political official, Stoughton was the man to call. With a crisp command of both old and New England code, he had for years been the go-to person for legal advice.* He was specifically requested when tempers flared. English officials repeatedly bemoaned the dearth of qualified civil servants in Ma.s.sachusetts; they cited Stoughton as a rare exception. He knew how to proceed with exquisite caution, dampening explosions, tacking gracefully among egos and administrations. He would smooth the waters when, in council, William Phips informed the New Hamps.h.i.+re lieutenant governor he was "an impudent, saucy, pitiful jakanapes."

A lifelong bachelor, Stoughton was the second son of an early Ma.s.sachusetts magistrate, a leading colonial light and early Harvard benefactor, a founder of Dorchester, a pleasant town of about two hundred homes, scenically spread along two lazy rivers, lush with orchards and gardens. Socially, Stoughton ranked highest in his Harvard cla.s.s. He completed a master's degree at Oxford. He afterward preached part-time in Dorchester but resisted regular calls to accept its pulpit. Well-connected, beautifully educated, he was a choice candidate. Six attractive ministerial offers came his way; he declined each, opting instead for a political career. He enjoyed a meteoric rise. He settled into a Dorchester mansion surrounded by extensive pastures, meadows, orchards, cornfields, and a salt marsh.

At thirty-six, the first of his generation to do so, Stoughton preached the influential 1668 election sermon in Boston, essentially a state of the union address, distributed afterward to town leaders. In a cool-headed discourse, Stoughton ably burnished New England's founding myth. It reverberated; his words were still being cited twenty-four years later. American exceptionalism was not born with him, but-forty-eight years after the landing of the Mayflower-Stoughton articulated it as well as anyone. They were G.o.d's firstborns, his favorites, his most privileged; "What could have been done more for us than hath been done?" Stoughton dilated on divine expectation and paternal example, a cramped combination for a generation that preferred to luxuriate in their unworthiness. The colonists represented, Stoughton reminded his compatriots, the choice grain. A torrent of celestial blessings and expectations, mercies, advantages, privileges, liberties rained down upon them. Did they intend to flower or to molder in the wilderness? In light of the occasion, Stoughton cast a lordly vote for hierarchy. His compatriots submitted wisely to their "civic and spiritual guides." Also by necessity-it was the second-generation theme song-he despaired of a people who had grown less vigilant, "sermon-proof and ordinance proof." He injected the obligatory millennial note; the Lord would soon "finish his great works in the world." He nodded vaguely to adversaries in the murky middle distance. The Antichrist and his brood were on the march, for what promised to be a close battle. A generation before Parris had, Stoughton stressed "that this is the time wherein he that is not with Christ is against him." There were to be no neutral parties.

From the age of forty, Stoughton devoted himself to public office and land speculation, a traditionally lucrative combination, more so at a time when a thousand square miles of Connecticut could be purchased for fifty pounds and a coat. With English partners, usually in a.s.sociation with his closest political ally, Joseph Dudley, briefly president of the colony, Stoughton went on a land-acc.u.mulating spree through the 1680s. (As a royal agent groused, it was impossible to contest the Crown's claim to land t.i.tles when Ma.s.sachusetts justices inevitably turned out to be the owners of those lands.)* While settling Indian land claims in 1681, Stoughton and Dudley carved out two thousand acres-dense with stands of ma.s.sive white pine-for themselves. Five years later they presided over a (failed) venture to secure one hundred thousand acres along the Merrimack River.

In the two decades between the time he was appointed to the bench and the time he addressed Rebecca Nurse's jurors, Stoughton proved that while there might well be no neutrals, there are men who will flourish in any regime. At the outset of King Philip's War, he sailed to London, among the earliest in a century-long series of colonial agents who were to defend the independent-minded colony against charges of noncompliance and overreaching. He heard firsthand of their impertinence; in English eyes they were, as an official put it, all adolescents-and intemperate, bigoted adolescents at that. Stoughton made little headway. He listened with humiliation to accounts of colonial misdemeanors and to the earliest discussions of the voiding of the charter. He returned to Boston-by which time Burroughs had been driven from Casco and Salem's first minister from his pulpit-to a chilly reception. A moderate in English eyes, Stoughton appeared an appeaser at home.

Over the next years he executed a feat of acrobatic agility. He practically seemed a traitor when in 1684 the Crown revoked the Ma.s.sachusetts charter. Even Increase Mather declared him an enemy of the people. Stoughton served as deputy president under the temporary Dominion government, against the counsel of Willard and Increase Mather, who opposed that regime. (He would not, however, land in prison for ten months afterward, as did the less pliable Dudley.) He cooperated with Andros when the scarlet-coated governor arrived in December of 1686 to rein in wayward New England.

Displaying the gift for which he truly deserves his place in history and that must have kept the Nurse family monitoring his every move through July, Stoughton managed three years later to help unseat the royal governor on whose council he sat and whose courts he headed. He was the first to address Andros in the aftermath of the coup, informing his prison-bound superior that "he might thank himself for the present disaster that had befallen him." A year before the Parris girls began to twitch, Stoughton helped to