Books: Lives of the Necromancers

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In this fearful crisis appeared Joan of Arc, and in the most incredible
manner turned the whole tide of affairs. She was a servant in a poor
inn at Domremi, and was accustomed to perform the coarsest offices,
and in particular to ride the horses to a neighbouring stream to water.
Of course the situation of France and her hereditary king formed the
universal subject of conversation; and Joan became deeply impressed
with the lamentable state of her country and the misfortunes of her
king. By dint of perpetual meditation, and feeling in her breast the
promptings of energy and enterprise, she conceived the idea that she
was destined by heaven to be the deliverer of France. Agreeably to the
state of intellectual knowledge at that period, she persuaded herself
that she saw visions, and held communication with the saints. She had
conversations with St. Margaret, and St. Catherine of Fierbois. They
told her that she was commissioned by God to raise the siege of
Orleans, and to conduct Charles VII to his coronation at Rheims. St.
Catherine commanded her to demand a sword which was in her church at
Fierbois, which the Maid described by particular tokens, though she
had never seen it. She then presented herself to Baudricourt, governor
of the neighbouring town of Vaucouleurs, telling him her commission,
and requiring him to send her to the king at Chinon. Baudricourt at
first made light of her application; but her importunity and the
ardour she expressed at length excited him. He put on her a man's
attire, gave her arms, and sent her under an escort of two gentlemen
and their attendants to Chinon. Here she immediately addressed the
king in person, who had purposely hid himself behind his courtiers
that she might not know him. She then delivered her message, and
offered in the name of the Most High to raise the siege of Orleans,
and conduct king Charles to Rheims to be anointed. As a further
confirmation she is said to have revealed to the king before a few
select friends, a secret, which nothing but divine inspiration could
have discovered to her.

Desperate as was then the state of affairs, Charles and his ministers
immediately resolved to seize the occasion that offered, and put
forward Joan as an instrument to revive the prostrate courage of his
subjects. He had no sooner determined on this, than he pretended to
submit the truth of her mission to the most rigorous trial. He called
together an assembly of theologians and doctors, who rigorously
examined Joan, and pronounced in her favour. He referred the question
to the parliament of Poitiers; and they, who met persuaded that she
was an impostor, became convinced of her inspiration. She was mounted
on a high-bred steed, furnished with a consecrated banner, and marched,
escorted by a body of five thousand men, to the relief of Orleans. The
French, strongly convinced by so plain an interposition of heaven,
resumed the courage to which they had long been strangers. Such a
phenomenon was exactly suited to the superstition and credulity of the
age. The English were staggered with the rumours that every where went
before her, and struck with a degree of apprehension and terror that
they could not shake off. The garrison, informed of her approach, made
a sally on the other side of the town; and Joan and her convoy entered
without opposition. She displayed her standard in the market-place,
and was received as a celestial deliverer.

She appears to have been endowed with a prudence, not inferior to her
courage and spirit of enterprise. With great docility she caught the
hints of the commanders by whom she was surrounded; and, convinced of
her own want of experience and skill, delivered them to the forces as
the dictates of heaven. Thus the knowledge and discernment of the
generals were brought into play, at the same time that their
suggestions acquired new weight, when falling from the lips of the
heaven-instructed heroine. A second convoy arrived; the waggons and
troops passed between the redoubts of the English; while a dead
silence and astonishment reigned among the forces, so lately
enterprising and resistless. Joan now called on the garrison no longer
to stand upon the defensive, but boldly to attack the army of the
besiegers. She took one redoubt and then another. The English,
overwhelmed with amazement, scarcely dared to lift a hand against her.
Their veteran generals became spell-bound and powerless; and their
soldiers were driven before the prophetess like a flock of sheep. The
siege was raised.

Joan followed the English garrison to a fortified town which they
fixed on as their place of retreat. The siege lasted ten days; the
place was taken; and all the English within it made prisoners. The
late victorious forces now concentred themselves at Patay in the
Orleanois; Joan advanced to meet them. The battle lasted not a moment;
it was rather a flight than a combat; Fastolfe, one of the bravest of
our commanders, threw down his arms, and ran for his life; Talbot and
Scales, the other generals, were made prisoners. The siege of Orleans
was raised on the eighth of May, 1429; the battle of Patay was fought
on the tenth of the following month. Joan was at this time twenty-two
years of age.

This extraordinary turn having been given to the affairs of the
kingdom, Joan next insisted that the king should march to Rheims, in
order to his being crowned. Rheims lay in a direction expressly
through the midst of the enemies' garrisons. But every thing yielded
to the marvellous fortune that attended upon the heroine. Troyes
opened its gates; Chalons followed the example; Rheims sent a
deputation with the keys of the city, which met Charles on his march.
The proposed solemnity took place amidst the extacies and enthusiastic
shouts of his people. It was no sooner over, than Joan stept forward.
She said, she had now performed the whole of what God had commissioned
her to do; she was satisfied; she intreated the king to dismiss her to
the obscurity from which she had sprung.

The ministers and generals of France however found Joan too useful an
instrument, to be willing to part with her thus early; and she yielded
to their earnest expostulations. Under her guidance they assailed Laon,
Soissons, Chateau Thierry, Provins, and many other places, and took
them one after another. She threw herself into Compiegne, which was
besieged by the Duke of Burgundy in conjunction with certain English
commanders. The day after her arrival she headed a sally against the
enemy; twice she repelled them; but, finding their numbers increase
every moment with fresh reinforcements, she directed a retreat. Twice
she returned upon her pursuers, and made them recoil, the third time
she was less fortunate. She found herself alone, surrounded with the
enemy; and after having enacted prodigies of valour, she was compelled
to surrender a prisoner. This happened on the twenty-fifth of May,
1430.

It remained to be determined what should be the fate of this admirable
woman. Both friends and enemies agreed that her career had been
attended with a supernatural power. The French, who were so infinitely
indebted to her achievements, and who owed the sudden and glorious
reverse of their affairs to her alone, were convinced that she was
immediately commissioned by God, and vied with each other in reciting
the miraculous phenomena which marked every step in her progress. The
English, who saw all the victorious acquisitions of Henry V crumbling
from their grasp, were equally impressed with the manifest miracle,
but imputed all her good-fortune to a league with the prince of
darkness. They said that her boasted visions were so many delusions of
the devil. They determined to bring her to trial for the tremendous
crimes of sorcery and witchcraft. They believed that, if she were once
convicted and led out to execution, the prowess and valour which had
hitherto marked their progress would return to them, and that they
should obtain the same superiority over their disheartened foes. The
devil, who had hitherto been her constant ally, terrified at the
spectacle of the flames that consumed her, would instantly return to
the infernal regions, and leave the field open to English enterprise
and energy, and to the interposition of God and his saints.

An accusation was prepared against her, and all the solemnities of a
public trial were observed. But the proofs were so weak and
unsatisfactory, and Joan, though oppressed and treated with the utmost
severity, displayed so much acuteness and presence of mind, that the
court, not venturing to proceed to the last extremity, contented
themselves with sentencing her to perpetual imprisonment, and to be
allowed no other nourishment than bread and water for life. Before
they yielded to this mitigation of punishment, they caused her to sign
with her mark a recantation of her offences. She acknowledged that the
enthusiasm that had guided her was an illusion, and promised never
more to listen to its suggestions.

The hatred of her enemies however was not yet appeased. They
determined in some way to entrap her. They had clothed her in a female
garb; they insidiously laid in her way the habiliments of a man. The
fire smothered in the bosom of the maid, revived at the sight; she was
alone; she caught up the garments, and one by one adjusted them to her
person. Spies were set upon her to watch for this event; they burst
into the apartment. What she had done was construed into no less
offence than that of a relapsed heretic; there was no more pardon for
such confirmed delinquency; she was brought out to be burned alive in
the market-place of Rouen, and she died, embracing a crucifix, and in
her last moments calling upon the name of Jesus. A few days more than
twelve months, had elapsed between the period of her first captivity
and her execution.

ELEANOR COBHAM, DUCHESS OF GLOUCESTER.

This was a period in which the ideas of witchcraft had caught fast
hold of the minds of mankind; and those accusations, which by the
enlightened part of the species would now be regarded as worthy only
of contempt, were then considered as charges of the most flatigious
[Errata: _read_ flagitious] nature. While John, duke of Bedford,
the eldest uncle of king Henry VI, was regent of France, Humphrey of
Gloucester, next brother to Bedford, was lord protector of the realm
of England. Though Henry was now nineteen years of age, yet, as he was
a prince of slender capacity, Humphrey still continued to discharge
the functions of sovereignty. He was eminently endowed with popular
qualities, and was a favourite with the majority of the nation. He had
however many enemies, one of the chief of whom was Henry Beaufort,
great-uncle to the king, and cardinal of Winchester. One of the means
employed by this prelate to undermine the power of Humphrey, consisted
in a charge of witchcraft brought against Eleanor Cobham, his wife.

This woman had probably yielded to the delusions, which artful persons,
who saw into the weakness of her character, sought to practise upon
her. She was the second wife of Humphrey, and he was suspected to have
indulged in undue familiarity with her, before he was a widower. His
present duchess was reported to have had recourse to witchcraft in the
first instance, by way of securing his wayward inclinations. The duke
of Bedford had died in 1435; and Humphrey now, in addition to the
actual exercise of the powers of sovereigny, was next heir to the
crown in case of the king's decease. This weak and licentious woman,
being now duchess of Gloucester, and wife to the lord protector,
directed her ambition to the higher title and prerogatives of a queen,
and by way of feeding her evil passions, called to her counsels
Margery Jourdain, commonly called the witch of Eye, Roger Bolingbroke,
an astrologer and supposed magician, Thomas Southwel, canon of St.
Stephen's, and one John Hume, or Hun, a priest. These persons
frequently met the duchess in secret cabal. They were accused of
calling up spirits from the infernal world; and they made an image of
wax, which they slowly consumed before a fire, expecting that, as the
image gradually wasted away, so the constitution and life of the poor
king would decay and finally perish.

Hume, or Hun, is supposed to have turned informer, and upon his
information several of these persons were taken into custody. After
previous examination, on the twenty-fifth of July, 1441, Bolingbroke
was placed upon a scaffold before the cross of St. Paul's, with a
chair curiously painted, which was supposed to be one of his
implements of necromancy, and dressed in mystical attire, and there,
before the archbishop of Canterbury, the cardinal of Winchester, and
several other bishops, made abjuration of all his unlawful arts.

A short time after, the duchess of Gloucester, having fled to the
sanctuary at Westminster, her case was referred to the same high
persons, and Bolingbroke was brought forth to give evidence against
her. She was of consequence committed to custody in the castle of
Leeds near Maidstone, to take her trial in the month of October. A
commission was directed to the lord treasurer, several noblemen, and
certain judges of both benches, to enquire into all manner of treasons,
sorceries, and other things that might be hurtful to the king's person,
and Bolingbroke and Southwel as principals, and the duchess of
Gloucester as accessory, were brought before them. Margery Jourdain
was arraigned at the same time; and she, as a witch and relapsed
heretic, was condemned to be burned in Smithfield. The duchess of
Gloucester was sentenced to do penance on three several days, walking
through the streets of London, with a lighted taper in her hand,
attended by the lord mayor, the sheriffs, and a select body of the
livery, and then to be banished for life to the isle of Man. Thomas
Southwel died in prison; and Bolingbroke was hanged at Tyburn on the
eighteenth of November.

RICHARD III.

An event occurred not very long after this, which deserves to be
mentioned, as being well calculated to shew how deep an impression
ideas of witchcraft had made on the public mind even in the gravest
affairs and the counsels of a nation. Richard duke of Gloucester,
afterwards Richard III, shortly before his usurpation of the crown in
1483, had recourse to this expedient for disarming the power of his
enemies, which he feared as an obstacle to his project. Being lord
protector, he came abruptly into the assembly of the council that he
had left but just before, and suddenly asked, what punishment they
deserved who should be found to have plotted against his life, being
the person, as nearest akin to the young king, intrusted in chief with
the affairs of the nation? And, a suitable answer being returned, he
said the persons he accused were the queen-dowager, and Jane Shore,
the favourite concubine of the late king, who by witchcraft and
forbidden arts had sought to destroy him. And, while he spoke, he laid
bare his left arm up to the elbow, which appeared shrivelled and
wasted in a pitiable manner. "To this condition," said he, "have these
abandoned women reduced me."--The historian adds, that it was well
known that his arm had been thus wasted from his birth.

In January 1484, the parliament met which recognised the title of
Richard, and pronounced the marriage of Edward IV null, and its issue
illegitimate. [188] The same parliament passed an act of attainder
against Henry earl of Richmond, afterwards Henry VII, the countess of
Richmond, his mother, and a great number of other persons, many of
them the most considerable adherents of the house of Lancaster. Among
these persons are enumerated Thomas Nandick and William Knivet,
necromancers. In the first parliament of Henry VII this attainder was
reversed, and Thomas Nandick of Cambridge, conjurer, is specially
nominated as an object of free pardon. [189]

SANGUINARY PROCEEDINGS AGAINST WITCHCRAFT.

I am now led to the most painful part of my subject, but which does
not the less constitute one of its integral members, and which, though
painful, is deeply instructive, and constitutes a most essential
branch in the science of human nature. Wherever I could, I have
endeavoured to render the topics which offered themselves to my
examination, entertaining. When men pretended to invert the known laws
of nature, "murdering impossibility; to make what cannot be, slight
work;" I have been willing to consider the whole as an ingenious
fiction, and merely serving as an example how far credulity could go
in setting aside the deductions of our reason, and the evidence of
sense. The artists in these cases did not fail to excite admiration,
and gain some sort of applause from their contemporaries, though still
with a tingling feeling that all was not exactly as it should be, and
with a confession that the professors were exercising unhallowed arts.
It was like what has been known of the art of acting; those who
employed it were caressed and made every where welcome, but were not
allowed the distinction of Christian burial.

But, particularly in the fifteenth century, things took a new turn. In
the dawn of the day of good sense, and when historical evidence at
length began to be weighed in the scales of judgment, men became less
careless of truth, and regarded prodigies and miracles with a different
temper. And, as it often happens, the crisis, the precise passage from
ill to better, shewed itself more calamitous, and more full of
enormities and atrocity, than the period when the understanding was
completely hood-winked, and men digested absurdities and impossibility
with as much ease as their every day food. They would not now forgive
the tampering with the axioms of eternal truth; they regarded cheat
and imposture with a very different eye; and they had recourse to the
stake and the faggot, for the purpose of proving that they would no
longer be trifled with. They treated the offenders as the most
atrocious of criminals, and thus, though by a very indirect and
circuitous method, led the way to the total dispersion of those clouds,
which hung, with most uneasy operation, on the human understanding.

The university of Paris in the year 1398 promulgated an edict, in
which they complained that the practice of witchcraft was become more
frequent and general than at any former period. [190]

A stratagem was at this time framed by the ecclesiastical persecutors,
of confounding together the crimes of heresy and witchcraft. The first
of these might seem to be enough in the days of bigotry and implicit
faith, to excite the horror of the vulgar; but the advocates of
religious uniformity held that they should be still more secure of
their object, if they could combine the sin of holding cheap the
authority of the recognised heads of Christian faith, with that of
men's enlisting under the banners of Satan, and becoming the avowed
and sworn vassals of his infernal empire. They accordingly seem to
have invented the ideas of a sabbath of witches, a numerous assembly
of persons who had cast off all sense of shame, and all regard for
those things which the rest of the human species held most sacred,
where the devil appeared among them in his most forbidding form, and,
by rites equally ridiculous and obscene, the persons present
acknowledged themselves his subjects. And, having invented this scene,
these cunning and mischievous persecutors found means, as we shall
presently see, of compelling their unfortunate victims to confess that
they had personally assisted at the ceremony, and performed all the
degrading offices which should consign them in the world to come to
everlasting fire.

While I express myself thus, I by no means intend to encourage the
idea that the ecclesiastical authorities of these times were generally
hypocrites. They fully partook of the narrowness of thought of the
period in which they lived. They believed that the sin of heretical
pravity was "as the sin of witchcraft;" [191] they regarded them alike
with horror, and were persuaded that there was a natural consent and
alliance between them. Fully impressed with this conception, they
employed means from which our genuine and undebauched nature revolts,
to extort from their deluded victims a confession of what their
examiners apprehended to be true; they asked them leading questions;
they suggested the answers they desired to receive; and led the
ignorant and friendless to imagine that, if these answers were adopted,
they might expect immediately to be relieved from insupportable
tortures. The delusion went round. These unhappy wretches, finding
themselves the objects of universal abhorrence, and the hatred of
mankind, at length many of them believed that they had entered into a
league with the devil, that they had been transported by him through
the air to an assembly of souls consigned to everlasting reprobation,
that they had bound themselves in acts of fealty to their infernal
taskmasters [Errata: _read_ taskmaster], and had received from
him in return the gift of performing superhuman and supernatural feats.
This is a tremendous state of degradation of what Milton called the
"the faultless proprieties of nature," [192] which cooler thinking and
more enlightened times would lead us to regard as impossible, but to
which the uncontradicted and authentic voice of history compels us to
subscribe.

The Albigenses and Waldenses were a set of men, who, in the
flourishing provinces of Languedoc, in the darkest ages, and when the
understandings of human creatures by a force not less memorable than
that of Procrustes were reduced to an uniform stature, shook off by
some strange and unaccountable freak, the chains that were universally
imposed, and arrived at a boldness of thinking similar to that which
Luther and Calvin after a lapse of centuries advocated with happier
auspices. With these manly and generous sentiments however they
combined a considerable portion of wild enthusiasm. They preached the
necessity of a community of goods, taught that it was necessary to
wear sandals, because sandals only had been worn by the apostles, and
devoted themselves to lives of rigorous abstinence and the most severe
self-denial.

The Catholic church knew no other way in those days of converting
heretics, but by fire and sword; and accordingly pope Innocent the
Third published a crusade against them. The inquisition was expressly
appointed in its origin to bring back these stray sheep into the flock
of Christ; and, to support this institution in its operations, Simon
Montfort marched a numerous army for the extermination of the
offenders. One hundred thousand are said to have perished. They
disappeared from the country which had witnessed their commencement,
and dispersed themselves in the vallies of Piedmont, in Artois, and in
various other places. This crusade occurred in the commencement of the
thirteenth century; and they do not again attract the notice of
history till the middle of the fifteenth.

Monstrelet, in his Chronicle, gives one of the earliest accounts of
the proceedings at this time instituted against these unfortunate
people, under the date of the year 1459. "In this year," says he, "in
the town of Arras, there occurred a miserable and inhuman scene, to
which, I know not why, was given the name of _Vaudoisie_. There
were taken up and imprisoned a number of considerable persons
inhabitants of this town, and others of a very inferior class. These
latter were so cruelly put to the torture, that they confessed, that
they had been transported by supernatural means to a solitary place
among woods, where the devil appeared before them in the form of a man,
though they saw not his face. He instructed them in the way in which
they should do his bidding, and exacted from them acts of homage and
obedience. He feasted them, and after, having put out the lights, they
proceeded to acts of the grossest licentiousness." These accounts,
according to Monstrelet, were dictated to the victims by their
tormentors; and they then added, under the same suggestion, the names
of divers lords, prelates, and governors of towns and bailliages, whom
they affirmed they had seen at these meetings, and who joined in the
same unholy ceremonies. The historian adds, that it cannot be
concealed that these accusations were brought by certain malicious
persons, either to gratify an ancient hatred, or to extort from the
rich sums of money, by means of which they might purchase their escape
from further prosecution. The persons apprehended were many of them
put to the torture so severely, and for so long a time, and were
tortured again and again, that they were obliged to confess what was
laid to their charge. Some however shewed so great constancy, that
they could by no means be induced to depart from the protestation of
their innocence. In fine, many of the poorer victims were inhumanly
burned; while the richer with great sums of money procured their
discharge, but at the same time were compelled to banish themselves to
distant places, remote from the scene of this cruel outrage.--Balduinus
of Artois gives a similar account, and adds that the sentence of the
judges was brought, by appeal under the revision of the parliament of
Paris, and was reversed by that judicature in the year 1491. [193]

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