A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

prick her all over for ‘devil’s marks’ - spots that were supposed to be insensitive to pain after being
touched by the devil, or to toss the suspected witch into a pond and see whether she floated - if not,
she was condemned.
But after only a year of this, commonsense reasserted itself. A clergyman named Gaule attacked
Hopkins from the pulpit and published a pamphlet pointing out that it was still illegal in England to
torture witches. Hopkins suddenly became unpopular, and when an angry crowd tossed him into a
pond, he decided it was time to retire on his profits. Later the same year, he died of tuberculosis.
And in England, the witchcraft craze was at an end.
In America, it reached its climax in Salem in 1692. A neurotic and unpopular clergyman named
Samuel Parris became convinced that the black maid Tituba (from Barbados) was teaching the
children to practise voodoo - which was probably true. The children, aged nine, eleven and twelve,
began having strange convulsions and declaring that spirits were pinching them. Tituba was beaten,
and confessed to being a witch. She implicated various other old women, who were arrested and
tortured. The whole area was suddenly possessed by witchcraft hysteria, believing that the witches
turned themselves into birds and animals at night. In a few months, twenty people were tried and
executed, including a sceptical farmer named Proctor, who denounced the trials as nonsense, and a
man named Corey, who was pressed to death under heavy weights; his wife was also hanged.
Like Matthew Hopkins, the children who had started the whole thing were now regarded as experts
on witchcraft, and were called to the neighbouring town to identify witches. Forty arrests were
made in Andover, and the magistrate himself had to flee when he refused to order more.
At this point, the girls overreached themselves, naming the wife of the governor as a witch. When
the governor, Sir William Phips, returned from fighting Indians, he dismissed the court and
released most of the accused. The witch hysteria ended as abruptly as it began. The Rev. Samuel
Parris had to leave Salem with his family.
In France, as in England and America, the witchcraft craze blew itself out in a storm of
extraordinary violence: the Chambre Ardente affair. And in this case, there is evidence that it was
not entirely a matter of smoke without fire. In 1673 - in the reign of Louis XIV - two priests
informed the authorities that many of their penitents had asked absolution for murdering their
spouses by poison. What was happening, it seemed, was that a ring of fortune tellers and witches
were supplying poisons - euphemistically known as ‘succession powders’ - to men and women who
wanted to get rid of their current spouses in favour of lovers or mistresses. The chief of police,
Nicholas de la Reynie, asked his agents to begin making cautious enquiries. A fortune teller named
Marie Bosse was reported to have said that she would be able to retire when she had arranged three
more poisonings; Reynie sent a disguised policewoman to consult her on how to get rid of her
husband. The fortune teller sold her poison, and was arrested.
It soon became clear to Reynie that this case concerned more than a few unscrupulous old women.
There was a widespread ‘poisons ring’, dealing in undetectable poisons - rather as a modern drugs
ring deals in drugs - and many wealthy and influential men seemed to be mixed up in it; but there
was also an element of black magic, and here he found that many priests were involved. Abortions
were performed and the unwanted babies ‘sacrificed’ on an altar, their blood often falling on to the
breast of a naked girl who was lying there.
Now France may be said to have had something of a tradition of monastic misdemeanours
connected with black magic. In the 1630s, there was a scandal involving Franciscan nuns in a