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Exorcising Madness in Late Elizabethan England: The Seduction of Arthington and the Criminal Culpability of Demoniacs

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2012

Owen Williams
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Journal of British Studies , Volume 47 , Issue 1 , January 2008 , pp. 30 - 52
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Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 2008

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References

1 Bracton, De legibus et consuetudinibus Angliæ, vol. 2, trans., with revisions and notes, by Samuel E. Thorne (Cambridge, MA, 1968), 290–91. The Augustinian sentiment was later phrased more popularly and succinctly by Sir Edward Coke as “Et actus non facit reum, nisi mens sit rea” (“An act does not make [the doer of it] guilty, unless the mind be guilty, that is, unless the intention be criminal. The intent and the act must both concur to constitute the crime”), in The third part of the Institutes of the laws of England: concerning high treason, and others please of the crown, and criminall causes, in The Selected Writings of Sir Edward Coke, vol. 2, ed. and trans. Steve Sheppard Indianapolis, 961 n. 58.

2 Although several sources refer to him as “Ardington,” the spelling has been changed to Arthington throughout this article for consistency; see Thomas Phelippes to Henry St. Main, Calendar of State Papers Domestic (CSPD) (London, 1856–72), 74–76. Although we do not know for certain to whom Phelippes was ultimately writing this report on 19 June 1591 or for what purpose (Henry St. Main was an alias for William Sterrell, a fellow intelligence gatherer and Catholic recusant), he does include some interesting details of what transpired. Phelippes had served the late Sir Francis Walsingham as chief cryptanalyst and intelligence gatherer. During the previous decade, Phelippes was instrumental in deciphering the messages between the Babington conspirators and Mary, queen of Scots; thus his work was crucial to her successful prosecution. As with most Elizabethan spies, little is known about him. After Walsingham's death in April 1590, Phelippes's services were terminated by Burghley in an effort to control expenditures, and we can assume that he turned to freelancing his intelligence services to other privy counselors who wanted to appear well informed, like the earl of Essex. Hammer, Paul E. J. suggests this in The Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics: The Political Career of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, 1585–1597 Cambridge, 155–63Google Scholar.

3 Acts of the Privy Council of England: New Series (APC), vol. 21, A.D. 1591 London, 293, 297, 299, 300, 319, 325.

4 APC, 297–98. This letter encourages Wolley and Fortescue to call the following officers for help in the examination of the three: Sir Gilbert Gerard, the master of the rolls; two masters of the requests, Mr. Doctor “Awbrey” (William Aubrey), a civil lawyer opposed to Puritanism and Brownism, and Mr. (Ralph) Rookeby (or Rokeby), a common lawyer who owed his position as master of the requests to Walsingham; Mr. Sergeant Thomas Owen, then sergeant-at-law and later judge of the court of common pleas; and Mr. Richard Yong (or Young), notorious rackmaster for Elizabeth.

5 Ibid., 300.

6 That order directed that Fuller was to be delivered to the Fleet Prison to be examined by attorney general Sir John Popham and solicitor general Sir Thomas Egerton (ibid.). No torture was mentioned.

7 APC, 16 May 1591, 130. This is also referred to in John Strype's Life of Whitgift, vol. 3 Oxford, 235–60. The nine ministers had been arrested in late 1590 and summoned before the ecclesiastical commission but refused to take the ex officio mero oath. They were then transferred to the Star Chamber on 13 May 1591 for further prosecution. The most prominent of these ministers, Thomas Cartwright, was not released until 21 May 1592 and then only to house arrest.

8 Anne Dudley, countess of Warwick, was noted for her influence on behalf of Puritan divines. Davison, of course, fell into Elizabeth's disfavor after the execution of Mary, since he was the one who delivered the warrant signed by her for Mary's execution.

9 Richard Cosin, Conspiracie for Pretended Reformation: viz. Presbyteriall Discipline. A Treatise discovering the late designmentes and courses held for advancement thereof, by William Hacket Yeoman, Edmund Coppinger, and Henry Arthington Gent. out of others depositions and their owne letters, writings & confessions upon examination … London. This text provides the most complete account of the Hacket affair but is supplemented by Arthington's version of the events in The Seduction of Arthington by Hacket especiallie, with some tokens of his unfained repentance and Submission London and by a “Memorandum of the arraignment, at Newgate, of William Hacket, of Northamptonshire, for high treason,” found in The Manuscripts of Lord Kenyon, Historical Manuscripts Commission, fourteenth report, appendix, pt. 4 London, 607–9. Unfortunately there is no extant copy of a tract licensed to Robert Bourne on the day of Hacket's execution, 28 July 1591, entitled A Life, Arraignment, Judgement, and Execution of William Hacket. Perhaps those materials were included with Arthington's apology, since “R. B.” printed The Seduction of Arthington.

10 Whether their also proclaiming Hacket the Emperor of Europe was the disciples’ idea or the Cheapside Messiah's was not immediately determined. In addition to the Acts of the Privy Council, see also Stow's, JohnThe annales of England, faithfully collected out of the most autenticall authors, records, and other monuments of antiquitie, from the first inhabitation vntill this present yeere 1592 London, 1288–90Google Scholar.

11 Cosin tells us that Hacket appeared before Sir William Webb, the lord mayor of London (either Cosin is mistaken or Allot must have died in the interim); Henry, Lord Wentworth; Sir Gilbert Gerrard, knight, former attorney general and master of the rolls; Sir Wolfstane (or Wolstan) Dixie, a former lord mayor of London; Sir Richard Martin, knight and alderman of the City of London; Master Sergeant William Fleetwood, the recorder of London; and several others named to that Old Bailey commission. The reason that Hacket was tried in the Old Bailey, more properly the justice hall adjoining Newgate prison, was that London had no assize sessions as such to handle trials for the peace of the City of London. See Baker, J. H., “Criminal Courts and Procedure at Common Law 1550–1800,” in Crime in England 1550–1800, ed. Cockburn, J. S.London, 15–48, quote on 31Google Scholar.

12 Popham would be made lord chief justice of the Queen's Bench on 2 June 1592; Egerton succeeded Popham as attorney general.

13 Cosin, Conspiracie, 68.

14 APC, 325–26.

15 Cosin, Conspiracie, 71–72.

16 Both historians follow Cosin's Conspiracie closely in focusing on the written correspondence between Hacket's disciples and the imprisoned ministers awaiting trial who cautioned against any precipitous moves on the part of these fanatics. See Booty's, John “Tumult in Cheapside: The Hacket Conspiracy,” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 42, no. 3 (September 1973): 293–317Google Scholar; and Collinson, Patrick, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement Berkeley, 424–25Google Scholar.

17 Bauckham, Richard, Tudor Apocalypse: Sixteenth Century Apocalypticism, Millennarianism, and the English Reformation: From John Bale to John Foxe and Thomas Brightman Oxford, 191–207Google Scholar; Thomas, Keith, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England Oxford, 133–35Google Scholar.

18 See Breight, Curtis Charles, “Duelling Ceremonies: The Strange Case of William Hacket, Elizabethan Messiah,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 19, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 35–67Google Scholar, quote on 40. Breight also argues that Hacket's uprising was manipulated by official propaganda into the genre of treason treatises that related the various plots against Elizabeth from the 1580s and beyond.

19 Walsham, Alexandra, “‘Frantick Hacket’: Prophecy, Sorcery, Insanity, and the Elizabethan Puritan Movement,” Historical Journal 41, no. 1 (March 1998): 27–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This piece is obviously indebted to many of her arguments, particularly to the ways in which madness and piety were intertwined in the Puritan movement of the early 1590s.

19 Fitter, Chris, “‘Your Captain is Brave and Vows Reformation’: Jack Cade, the Hacket Rising, and Shakespeare's Vision of Popular Rebellion in 2 Henry VI,” Shakespeare Studies 32 (2004): 173–219Google Scholar.

21 Cosin, Conspiracie, 72, 76.

22 In fact, Arthington reminds his readers several times in his published apology that he was “not once … brought before the bar of justice”; God had protected him from the punishment meted out by the Newgate Session to Hacket, a fact which he accepts as proof of God's mercy for the most wretched of sinners (Seduction, 47).

23 See Walker, Nigel, Crime and Insanity in England, vol. 1 Edinburgh, 183–84Google Scholar. Tellingly, following this statute is one claiming the lives and goods of Catherine Howard and her “complices” in a statute proclaiming it high treason for a woman to marry the king, having concealed her prior incontinence, or for her to “move any other to have carnal knowledge with [her].”

24 Coke (Third part of the Institutes, 957) had cautioned against charging the insane with treason, “God forbid that in cases so penall, the law should not be certaine; and if it be certaine in case of murder and felony, à fortiori, it ought to be certaine in case of treason.”

25 The statute is 25 Edw. III, st. 5, c. 2 (trans. from Coke, Third part of the Institutes, 956–63).

26 Here Coke is probably referring to Philip and Mary's general repeal of Edwardian treason law, their corrective statute, An Act whereby certain Offences be made Treasons, and also for the Government of the King's and Queen's Majesties Issue: “And be it further enacted by the Authority aforesaid, That all Trials hereafter to be had, awarded or made for any Treason, shall be had and used, only according to the due Order and Course of the Common Laws of this Realm, and not otherwise,” this “due Order and Course” has as its heart the defendant's right to face his or her accusers (1 & 2 Ph. & M, c. 10, secs. 7–8); Coke, Third part of the Institutes, 963–64.

27 Cosin also mentions that Hacket had once bit off and swallowed a schoolteacher's nose in a tavern brawl (Conspiracie, 4–5, 8).

28 Cosin, Conspiracie, 73.

29 Many years later, church historian Thomas Fuller (1608–61) repeated the rumor of insanity with respect to Hacket's case: “I know what one Lawyer pleadeth in his [Hacket’s] behalf, though it be little credit to be the Advocate of such a Client, That the Bishops had made him madd with persecuting of him. Sure it was, if he were madd, not any learning but overmuch pride made him so, and sure it is, he discovered no distemper in other particulars, personating at least wise, if not performing all things with a composed gravity. But there is a madness which Physicians count most uncurable, and call it Modesta Insania, when one is mad, as to one particular point alone, whilst serious and sober in all other things” (The Church-History of Britain, vol. 9 [London, 1655], 206). That a church historian like Fuller was willing to diagnose “Modesta Insania” in a case seventeen years before his birth indicates the magnitude of the task Cosin had before him in arguing that Hacket was sane.

30 Cosin, Conspiracie, 73.

31 Winfried Schleiner has called Cosin's list “a treasure trove for the use of specific terms for madness” in “The Feste-Malvolio Scene in Twelfth Night against the Background of Renaissance Ideas about Madness and Possession,” Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft West (1990): 48–57, quote on 49.

32 Cosin does tell us that, in everyday speech, Furor is commonly called “madnes” or “woodnes,” while one suffering from Dementia is said to be “distracted of wit” or “beside himselfe” (Conspiracie, 73–74).

33 Cosin, Conspiracie, 73–74.

34 Ibid., 74.

35 Ibid., 78.

36 Ibid., 80.

37 Ibid., 78.

38 Ibid., 75. Thomas N. Tentler points out that “the whole penitential system of the medieval church is founded on the proposition that men are responsible for their own willful acts, thoughts, and words, but only if they have actually willed those acts, thoughts, and words. There is a legal sense of responsibility: to be guilty a man must be intentionally involved. To attribute some act of a man, it is necessary that his rational self, not just his material body, participate in it. … At all levels the church defines guilt in terms of the assent of the human will” (Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation [Princeton, NJ, 1977], 149).

39 Cosin, Conspiracie, 75.

40 Ibid., 72–73.

41 APC, 361. No record of Fortescue's examination is extant.

42 Arthington's Seduction is dated 25 February 1592 in its dedicatory epistle.

43 Arthington, Seduction, 15.

44 Ibid., 23–24.

45 For example, as editors since Lewis Theobald have recognized, Shakespeare used Samuel Harsnett's A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures London as a primary source for his depiction of Edgar's feigned possession. According to Stephen Greenblatt, the theatricality of exorcism was being laid at the Jesuit doorstep at the very moment when the Puritan minister John Darrell dispossessed many afflicted demoniacs. See his famous chapter “Shakespeare and the Exorcists,” in Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England Berkeley, 94–128.

46 For an excellent article discussing the laity's continuing need for the Puritan practice of healing demoniacs through prayer and fasting, see MacDonald's, Michael “Religion, Social Change, and Psychological Healing in England, 1600–1800,” in The Church and Healing, ed. Sheils, W. J.Oxford, 101–25Google Scholar.

47 Harsnett's, SamuelA Discovery of the Fraudulent practises of John Darrell, Bacheler of Artes … LondonGoogle Scholar, which exposed Darrell's exorcism of Thomas Darling, the Boy of Burton (1596), preceded his Declaration, which recounted the fraudulent exorcism of the Denham Six (1585–86). The event in Cheapside occurred at the beginning of the decade that would culminate with the John Darrell—Will Somers—Samuel Harsnett nexus that would raise the stakes of the “politics of exorcism” immensely. See esp. Freeman, Thomas, “Demons, Deviance and Defiance: John Darrell and the Politics of Exorcism in late Elizabethan England,” in Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c. 1560–1660, ed. Lake, Peter and Questier, MichaelWoodbridge, 34–63Google Scholar. Incidentally, Arthington's case occurred at about the same time as that of the Throckmorton Children (1589–93), also known as the Warboys case. F. W. Brownlow has produced an edition of A Declaration in his Shakespeare, Harsnett, and the Devils of Denham (Newark, DE, 1993).

48 Boorde, Andrew, The Breviary of Helthe London, lxxxxia–bGoogle Scholar. Other melancholics “be euer in feare and drede, and dothe thynke they shall neuer do well, but euer be in parell either of soule or body or both, wherfore they do fle from one place to another, and can nat tel where to be except they be kept in safegarde” (The Extravagantes, appended to The Breviary of Helthe, for all maner of syckenesses and diseases [London, 1547], xva).

49 Boorde, Andrew, Extravagantes, xiiiib–xva, iiiibGoogle Scholar. Interestingly, for all these topics, Boorde directs his reader to the preceding chapters in the Breviary, except for the demoniacus, which is given six pages of the Extravagantes, iiib–viia. When discussing the causes of demonic possession, Boorde explains that “This matter does passe al maner of sicknesses and diseases” before referring to the locus classicus in the ninth chapter of Mark. That demoniac was dispossessed by means of prayer and fasting, just as the Puritans of late Elizabethan England would prescribe, but Boorde is convinced that his midcentury contemporaries are much less likely to regard the efficacy of prayer and fasting in such cases. Boorde goes on to describe the dispossession of a German woman chained to a pillar in Rome, which gives him a chance to describe the depravity of the Eternal City's inhabitants and to chastise the English for the prevalence of swearing. While Boorde does not discuss any remedies for the demoniac other than to “kepe them in a sure custody,” he does prescribe the following treatment for the maniac. After placing him in a pleasant room with light entertainment (and away from study), “vse the pacient so that he do nat hurt him selfe nor no other man, and he must be kept in feare of one man or an other and if nede requyre he muste be punyshed & beten” (Breviary, lxxxviiia–b). Apart from the part about pleasant surroundings, his cure sounds much like the one twice used on Hacket by the Northamptonshire authorities.

50 As that scourge of exorcists, Samuel Harsnett himself, reminded his readers, “The Philosophers old aphorisme is, cerebrum Melancholicum est sedes daemonum.” Harsnett translates the tag as “a melancholicke braine is the chaire of estate for the devil” (quoted in Brownlow, Shakespeare, Harsnett, and the Devils of Denham, 304).

51 Rituale Romanum Pauli V. Pont. Max, iussu editum Venice, 249. I am indebted for this citation to Stuart Clark's Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe Oxford, 394.

52 Walker, D. P., Unclean Spirits: Possession and Exorcism in France and England in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries Philadelphia, 36Google Scholar. Walker also reminds us that Reginald Scot, who wrote The Discoverie of Witchcraft London, “follows Cardanus in attributing the principal reason for the belief that witches exist to ‘the imagination of the melancholike’” (11).

53 Bright, T., Doctor of Phisicke, A Treatise of Melancholie. Containing the causes thereof, & reasons of the strange effects it worketh in our minds and bodies: with the phisicke cure, and spirituall consolation for such as have thereto adjoyned an afflicted conscience. The difference betwixt it, and melancholie with diverse philosophicall discourses touching actions, and affections of soule, spirit, and body: the particulars whereof are to be seen before the book London, 183–84Google Scholar.

54 Carol Thomas Neely has pointed out that Bright's construction of “the careful distinctions between spiritual and physiological melancholy repeatedly collapse. Both states are characterized by the same symptoms: hallucinatory terror and unreasonable sadness. Natural melancholy predisposes one to spiritual doubt while spiritual doubt exacerbates the pathology of black bile” (“‘Documents in Madness’: Reading Madness and Gender in Shakespeare's Tragedies and Early Modern Culture,” Shakespeare Quarterly 42, no. 3 [Fall 1991]: 315–38, quote on 319). Of course such “careful distinctions” are only carefully applicable to Elizabethan England and not only in distinguishing various species of humoral disease.

55 Sir Browne's, ThomasReligio Medici, in Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and The Garden of Cyrus, ed. Robbins, R. H. A.Oxford, bk. 1, sec. 30Google Scholar.

56 Beatrice White provides this number in her introduction to George Gifford's A Dialogue concerning Witches and Witchcraftes, 1593, Shakespeare Association Facsimiles, no. 1 Oxford, v.

57 Arthington, Seduction, 36. Whether or not English Protestants thought that contemporary cases of demonic possession were real, they largely agreed that the Catholic ritual of exorcism was fraudulent. In place of the Catholic's holy water, benedictions, and use of sacraments, Puritans recommended prayer and fasting, a practice based on the apostolic cures of demoniacs located at Matthew 17 and Mark 9.

58 The diagnoses and treatment of mental disorders was coming into being at about this time. For contemporary manuals describing types of insanity (in addition to Andrew Boorde's Breviary), see also Barrough's, PhilipThe methode of phisicke, conteining the causes, signes, and cures of inward diseases in mans bodie from the head to the foote. Whereunto is added, the forme and rule of making remedies and medicines, which our phisitions commonly vse at this day, with the proportion, quantitie, and names of ech medicine LondonGoogle Scholar.

59 Arthington, Seduction, 35.

60 For one of the best studies of these causes and the willingness of contemporaries to believe in them, see Brownlow, Shakespeare, Harsnett, and the Devils of Denham. For the political implications of madness in the case of the ambitious earl of Essex, for example, see Coddon, Karin S., “‘Such Strange Desygns’: Madness, Subjectivity, and Treason in Hamlet and Elizabethan Culture,” in William Shakespeare: Hamlet, ed. Wofford, Susanne L.New York, 380–402Google Scholar.

61 Arthington, Seduction, 23.

62 Ibid., 49–50.

63 Ibid., 29–30.

64 Ibid., 4.

65 Ibid., 49. In the margin Arthington provides the reference to Paul's epistle to the Romans 7:25.

66 A calendar of the archbishop's papers indicates this letter was received (Lambeth Palace Library, Fairhurst Papers, MS 2008, fol. 42). The Acts of the Privy Council for 1592 contains the text of the original; Arthington is identified in the margin as a “recusant” (98).

67 Langbein, John H., Torture and the Law of Proof: Europe and England in the Ancien Régime Chicago, 81–128Google Scholar.

68 Dobb, Clifford, “London's Prisons” Shakespeare Survey 17 (1964): 87–100CrossRefGoogle Scholar, quote on 89. One suspects that Arthington enjoyed his treatment there much less than William Fennor would in 1616. See Fennor's account of life in the Wood Street Counter in The Compters Commonwealth London.

69 APC, 299, 300.

70 Arthington describes the local provisions made for the destitute in Wakefield in his short policy piece, Provision for the Poore London, B4v.

71 CSPD addenda, 1580–1625, 63.

72 “It is not vnknown vnto hir Highnes Councell established in the North partes, that I haue beene a detector of Seminaries, olde massing Priests and Iesuits, with such like deuoted enymies vnto hir Maiestie, and haue beene in commission for such purposes” (Arthington, Seduction, 42).

73 Arthington's The Exhortation of Saloman London, which he describes as the “second fruit of my true repentance,” was jointly dedicated to George Clifford, the privateering third earl of Cumberland, and his wife, Countess Margaret (née Russell). After rehearsing his deliverance from that “vile Sorcerer Hacket” and thanking God, Elizabeth, her Privy Council, and “all christian people,” he goes on to write, “seeing next her most excellent Maiestie and honorable Councell in sparing my life, I am most bounden vnto your Hh for the continuall maintenance thereof: her Ladyship mouing, and your Lordship consenting to renue my Grant from your right honorable Father: yea, more than so, whereas I was both vnfit and vnable to discharge that office, wherewith I was charged by my Patent, your L. hath disburdned me of the same to attend better matters, and for those grounds which I had in possession, to allow mee one hundred marks per annum during my life” (Exhortation of Salomon, A3r). We learn from Arthington's apology that his original patent consisted of attending to a “company of wild deare” (Seduction, 59). The strong possibility exists that Margaret, known for her Puritan enterprises in the West Riding, stepped in to encourage her husband, the queen's champion, to consent to Arthington's alienating the patent granted to him by Clifford's father in exchange for the rights to the Free School in Wakefield (which was granted to Sir George Savile and schoolmaster Edward Mawde on 19 November 1591, two days after Arthington's brother and wife visited him in the Counter); see CSPD, 122. See also Page, William, ed., A History of Yorkshire, vol. 1 London, 440–42Google Scholar.

74 Bancroft, Richard, Daungerous Positions and Proceedings, published and practiced within this Iland of Brytaine, under pretence of Reformation, and for the Presbiteriall Discipline LondonGoogle Scholar.

75 Ibid., 170–71.

76 As historian John Booty points out in his examination of the event, “Were such men as Hacket, Coppinger and Arthington to appear now, there would be no hesitation in committing them to some mental institution. They had visions, they spoke irrationally, they were confused as to their identities, and Hacket, with his history of antisocial behavior, was certainly unable to handle his aggressive tendencies in any acceptable fashion. The verdict of the time, however, was that they were not insane, but rather radicals bent upon the destruction of the lawful government. They were also, so they claimed, zealous Christian men intent upon reforming church and state, bringing in the kingdom of God”; see Booty, “Tumult in Cheapside,” 317.

77 To describe madness vis-à-vis the two traditional parts of the conscience inherited from the medieval scholastics like Aquinas and Jerome, using Cosin's terminology, neither those suffering from Furor or Dementia can draw upon the synderesis, the divine storehouse of universal moral precepts. They do not have “any ruled memorie,” and thus their conscientiae cannot apply these precepts to particular actions by syllogism, regardless of their inability to reason by syllogism. Thus expertly feigned madness, as defined by Cosin at least, would have been the perfect defense for those on trial for their conscience's sake in Elizabethan England: the furious and demented can neither testify against themselves, being as “utterly ignorant” of their actions as if they had not witnessed them, nor can they be found culpable for their actions, because they have no “ruled memorie” to guide them toward feelings of guilt for their actions. Furthermore, they should not be punished for their actions because the inability to intend an action necessarily implies a lack of guilt; see Cosin, Conspiracie, 74–75.