Part 12 (1/2)
_Tuning a psalm--A black thing--A double tongued woman--A doleful noise--Burning the herbs--The sick child--Gardiner's ox--The dead ram--Burning ”the sow's tale”_
Goodwife Howell, during her illness which hastened Elizabeth's arrest, ”tuned a psalm and screked out several times together very grievously,”
and cried ”a witch! a witch! now are you come to torter me because I spoke two or three words against you,” and also said, she saw a black thing at the beds featte, that Garlick was double-tongued, pinched her with pins, and stood by the bed ready to tear her in pieces. And William Russell, in a fit of insomnia or indigestion, before daybreak, ”heard a very doleful noyse on ye backside of ye fire, like ye noyse of a great stone thrown down among a heap of stones.”
Goody Birdsall ”declared y't she was in the house of Goody Simons when Goody Bishop came into the house with ye dockweed and between Goody Davis and Goody Simons they burned the herbs. Farther, she said y't formerly dressing flax at Goody Davis's house, Goody Davis saith y't she had dressed her children in clean linen at the island, and Goody Garlick came in and said, 'How pretty the child doth look,' and so soon as she had spoken Goody Garlick said, 'the child is not well, for it groaneth,'
and Goody Davis said her heart did rise, and Goody Davis said, when she took the child from Goody Garlick, she said she saw death in the face of it, & her child sickened presently upon it, and lay five daies and 5 nights and never opened the eyes nor dried till it died. Also she saith as she dothe remember Goody Davis told her upon some difference between Mr. Gardiner or some of his family, Goodman Garlick gave out some threateningse speeches, & suddenly after Mr. Gardiner had an ox legge broke upon Ram Island. Moreover Goody Davis said that Goody Garlick was a naughtie woman.”
Goody Edwards testified: ”Y't as Goody Garlick owned, she sent to her daughter for a little best milk and she had some and presently after, her daughters milk went away as she thought and as she remembers the child sickened about y't time.” Goody Hand deposed that ”she had heard Goody Davis say that she hoped Goody Garlick would not come to Eastharapton, because, she said, Goody Garlick was naughty, and there had many sad things befallen y'm at the Island, as about ye child, and ye ox, as Goody Birdsall have declared, as also the negro child she said was taken away, as I understood by her words, in a strange manner, and also of a ram y't was dead, and this fell out quickly one after another, and also of a sow y't was fat and l.u.s.tie and died. She said they did burn some of the sow's tale and presently Goody Garlick did come in.”
The settlers held a town meeting, and wisely questioning whether they had legal authority to hold a trial in a capital case, they appointed a committee to go ”unto Keniticut to carry up Goodwife Garlick yt she may be delivered up unto the authoritie there for the trial of the cause of witchcraft which she is suspected for.” The General Court of Connecticut took jurisdiction of the case, a trial of Goody Garlick was held, resulting in her acquittal, and she was sent back to Easthampton, to what end is not told in the records of the day.
CHAPTER X
”This case is one of the most painful in the entire Connecticut list, for she impresses one as the best woman; how the just and high minded old lady had excited hate or suspicion, we cannot know.” _Connecticut as a Colony_ (1: 212), MORGAN.
”Mr. Dauenport gaue in as followeth--That Mr. Ludlow sitting with him and his wife alone, and discoursing of the pa.s.sages concerning Knapps wife, the Witch and her execution, said that she came downe from the ladder (as he understood it), and desired to speak with him alone, and told him who was the witch spoken of.” _New Haven Colonial Record_ (2: 78).
”Shortly after this, a poor simple minded woman living in Fairfield, by the name of Knap, was suspected of witchcraft. She was tried, condemned and sentenced to be hanged.” SCHENCK'S _History of Fairfield_ (1: 71).
”GOODWIFE KNAP”
This was one of the most notable of the witchcraft cases. It stands among the early instances of the infliction of the death penalty in Connecticut; the victim was presumably a woman of good repute, and not a common scold, an outcast, or a harridan; it is singularly ill.u.s.trative of witchcraft's activities and their grasp on the lives of the best men and women, of the beliefs that ruled the community, and of the crude and revolting practices resorted to in the punishments of the condemned, and especially since in its later developments it involved in controversy and litigation two of the great characters in colonial history, Rev.
John Davenport, one of the founders of New Haven, and Roger Ludlow, Deputy Governor of Ma.s.sachusetts and Connecticut.[I] Goodwife Knapp of Fairfield was ”suspicioned.” That was enough to set the villagers agog with talk and gossip and scandal about the unfortunate woman, which poisoned the wells of sober thought and charitable purpose, and swiftly ripened into a formal accusation and indictment.
[Footnote I: Connecticut, through its Commission of Sculpture, in recognition of his services to the Colony, is to erect a memorial statue to Ludlow to occupy the western niche on the northern facade of the Capitol building at Hartford.]
Pending her trial the prisoner was committed to the house of correction or common jail for the safe keeping of ”refractory persons” and criminals.
What terrors of mind and spirit must have waited on this ”simple minded”
woman, in the cold, gloomy, and comfortless prison, probably built of rough logs, with a single barred window and ma.s.sive iron studded door, a ghost haunted torture chamber, in charge of some harsh wardsmen.
Knapp was duly and truly tried, and sentenced to death by hanging, the usual mode of execution. _No witch was ever burned in New England._
From the day sentence was p.r.o.nounced until the hanging took place, out in Try's field beyond the Indian field, in view of the villagers, whose curiosity or thirst for horrors or whose duty led them there, this prisoner of delusion was made the object of rudest treatment, espionage, and of inhuman attempts to wring from her lips a confession of her own guilt or an accusation against some other person as a witch.
The very day of her condemnation, a self-const.i.tuted committee of women, with one man on it,--Mistress Thomas Sherwood, Goodwife Odell, Mistress Pell, and her two daughters, Goody Lockwood, and Goodwife Purdy,--visited the prison, and pressed her to name any other witch in town, and so receive such consolation from the minister as would be for her soul's welfare.
Mistress Pell seems to have been the chief spokeswoman, and each member of the committee served in some degree as an inquisitor, or exhorter, not to repentance, but to disclosures. Baited and badgered, warned and threatened, the hapless prisoner protested she was innocent, denied the charges made against her, told one of the committee to ”take heed the devile have not you,” and also said, ”I must not render evil for evil.... I have sins enough allready, and I will not add this [accusing another] to my condemnation.” And at last in agony of soul she made that pathetic appeal to one of her relentless tormentors, ”neuer, neuer poore creature was tempted as I am tempted, pray, pray for me.”
But even after death on the scaffold, the witch-hunters of the day did not refrain from their ghoulish work, but desecrated the remains of Goodwife Knapp at the grave side in their search for witch marks.
All the facts during the imprisonment, execution and burial are set forth in some of the testimonies herewith given, in a chapter of related history (the evidence at the trial not being disclosed in any present record), and all of them marked by a total unconsciousness of their sinister and revolting character.
No case in the history of the delusion in New England is more replete in incidents and apt ill.u.s.trations, due to their fortunate preservation in the records of a lawsuit involving some of the prominent characters in that drama of religious insanity.
At a magistrate's court held at New Haven the 29th of May, 1654.
Present.
Theophilus Eaton Esqr, Gouernor.