She fled Cleworth and returned to her mother’s home at Salford – and Edmund went with her. For Nicholas, who had spent months struggling to understand and deal with John’s behaviour, Margaret’s behaviour suddenly made everything clear. There could be only one explanation for Edmund’s hold over her – he had bewitched her. And therefore, he had also bewitched John. Edmund was arrested. A day or two later, there was an attempt to pressurize Margaret into making a statement against him by engineering a confrontation between them. But as she sat waiting by the fire,
she saw a great black dog, with a monstrous tail, and a long chain, open mouth, coming apace towards her, and, running by her left side, cast her on her face hard by the fire.20
When Edmund was brought in, Margaret collapsed and could not speak. Edmund was sent to Lancaster Gaol to await trial, but on the way, he was taken back to Cleworth Hall to collect some clothes he had left there.
[The children] went at him all at once, attempting to strike him. […] And if they had not been forcibly restrained, the witch would have been in great danger, for they were as fierce and furious against him as if they would have torn him to pieces.21
However, a month later, when a justice of the peace came to take formal statements from them, the children all refused to testify. Their anger towards Edmund had erupted purely out of a sense of personal betrayal and of John’s sense of being doubly betrayed. It was the fact that Edmund had abandoned him for Margaret that made John willing to believe that Edmund had bewitched him.
But Edmund’s arrest did not solve the children’s problems. On the contrary,
they had all and every one of them very strange visions and fearful apparitions, whereupon they would say, ‘Look where Satan is. Look where Beelzebub is. Look where Lucifer is. Look where a great black dog is, with a firebrand in his mouth.’22
At his trial, Edmund was charged not with bewitching Margaret, but with using witchcraft to harm John and Anne. Nicholas was the main – in fact probably the only – witness. Edmund was fiercely defiant, but in this conflict, there could never be any doubt who was going to win. The only question was the sentence. If the victims of witchcraft survived, the law at that time – the 1563 Act against Conjurations, Enchantments, and Witchcrafts – prescribed not the death penalty but a year’s imprisonment. But then Nicholas ‘called to mind the making of the circle’.23 According to the 1563 Act, ‘If any person […] use, practise, or exercise, any invocations or conjurations of evil and wicked spirits […] every such offender […] shall suffer pains of death as a felon.’24 At his execution, Edmund apparently ‘confessed that […] all which Master Starkie had charged him with was true’.25 This seems unlikely, but it was obviously very important to Nicholas to have a confession to take back to John, to prove that it was Nicholas, not Edmund, who was his real saviour. On John Dee’s advice, Nicholas had asked for help from a well-known Puritan exorcist named John Darrell. He arrived at Cleworth, along with his colleague George More, a few days after Edmund’s death and came to the conclusion that Margaret Byrom (who had been brought back to Cleworth) and the children were all actually possessed by evil spirits, and so too was one of the Starkies’ servants, Jane Ashton, who had barked and howled when the justice of the peace had tried to question her about Edmund.
The exorcisms involved over 30 people praying incessantly over the victims for several hours. Although the others rid themselves of their evil spirits by vomiting, John gnashed his teeth and was ‘so miserably rent, that abundance of blood gushed out, both at his nose and mouth’.26 Even after the spirits had been cast out, they continued to menace their hosts, appearing ‘sometimes in the likeness of a bear with open mouth, sometimes of an ape, sometimes of a big black dog, sometimes of a black raven with a yellow bill’.27 However, on one crucial level the exorcism had restored order. Everyone involved now knew that the victims were caught up in a straightforward battle between good and evil – and that the source of the evil was Edmund Hartlay’s magic.
3. The Magic
This was a tragedy that grew out of the nature of magic and the nature of the hold it exerted over those involved in its practices. And at its heart was a circle ritual. It would be easy – particularly in view of John Dee’s reproof – to take the attitude that Edmund made a fatal mistake when he went beyond the use of the charms and herbs that might seem more appropriate – and far safer – for a folk-magic practitioner. But, as we have already seen, the Christian charms used by people like Edmund in fact constructed for them a persona resonant with spiritual power. Magic was a spiritual belief system, whether it involved Edmund mixing vervain and peony or John Dee constructing the Seal of God. The influential sixteenth-century magician Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa wrote: ‘The very original, and chief worker of all [i.e. God] doth by angels, the heavens, stars, elements, animals, plants, metals, and stones convey from himself the virtues of his omnipotency upon us.’28
Emma Wilby, in her groundbreaking book Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits,29 has demonstrated that the animal-shaped spirits of the witch trial records in many cases represent powerful visionary experiences that were a crucial part of folk magic. The spirit encounters of village and small-town magical practitioners could be every bit as complex and varied as – and often remarkably similar to – those that resulted from the experiments of an educated magician like John Dee. At the heart of John Dee’s magic was The Sworn Book. His copy still exists – manuscript Sloane 313 in the British Library. The Sworn Book was written in the early thirteenth century by the magician Honorius ‘in collaboration with an angel called Hocrohel’30 and claimed to be the ultimate summary of the art of magic. It was a product of the Medieval Renaissance, when contact with the Arab world led to an extraordinary upheaval in the way many thinkers viewed the universe – a conviction that the universe was a complex and mysterious puzzle crying out to be engaged with, explored and investigated.
Europe’s first scientists such as Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon were inspired to study phenomena such as light and magnetism using the combination of observation, reasoning and experiments that would become the ‘experimental method’ of modern science.31 But science had a rival, sister discipline, equally passionate about engaging with the universe in the same spirit of individualistic scrutiny, but with a different emphasis: the discipline that The Sworn Book calls ‘the science of wisdom’ – magic.32 Magic sought to explore the creative spiritual forces that lay behind the natural world – and
