When Ann Jefferies was about to be arrested,
the fairies appeared to her and told her that a Constable would come that day, with a warrant to carry her before a Justice of the Peace and she would be sent to jail. She asked them if she should hide herself. They answered, No, she should fear nothing, but go with the Constable.48
It would seem that Edmund had received some similar reassurance from a spirit. Of course, saying ‘fear nothing’ is not the same as saying that nothing bad is going to happen. But it was part of the very nature of spirit encounters that they could make magical practitioners careless of their personal safety. They were the ultimate magical experience – and through them practitioners expressed their allegiance to magic’s alternative vision of the universe.49 Magic was not irrational – magic was anti-rational. It was a series of techniques – such as scrying and the use of charms and incantations – specifically devised to enable the intuitive and creative aspects of the mind to achieve precedence over the rational. In Daemonologie, King James I dismisses fairies as a delusion created by the Devil and condemns magical practitioners for their ‘curiosity’ and ‘restless minds’.50 Magic took people to a place where the normal rules did not apply, where the assumptions of the established social order were irrelevant. For those who experienced it, it was psychologically liberating, even when it involved exploring aspects of inner experience that were mysterious and dangerous. But in an authoritarian society based on simplistic concepts of good and evil it would always seem a threat.
Conclusion
Right from the start, John Starkie was suffering from the symptoms of a ‘restless mind’. But he not only had a natural tendency to find magic intriguing, he was also attracted to it precisely because it was a challenge to authority and fed into his struggle to assert his individuality within a family that was very much part of the Establishment. That was what Edmund offered and symbolized to John. Edmund might have been wary of allowing Nicholas to witness him invoking spirits, but that does not mean that he would (or could) have hidden from John the crucial role that spirits played in magic. On the contrary, magical practitioners envied children their openness to the spirit world and often employed them as scrying assistants.51 Ultimately, however, John would be convinced that magic was not a transformative vision of the universe, but delusion and chaos – a path not to liberation, but to possession.
Crucial to this transition, of course, was Nicholas’s view of what was happening to his son – of what John was becoming. Nicholas was forced to watch his relationship with John being steadily undermined by John’s relationship with Edmund. And John seized on those aspects of magical belief that he could use to challenge his father and command Edmund’s attention. And so, for Nicholas, John’s natural rebelliousness evolved into something devilish. Nicholas had been betrayed not only by Edmund but also by John. John had been contaminated by Edmund’s evil. This demonization of John’s experience of magic was effective enough to convince John as well, not only at the time but for the rest of his life. Thirty-seven years later, in 1634, John Starkie had succeeded his great-uncle Roger Nowell as justice of the peace for the Pendle area. Rumours reached him that a young boy called Edmund Robinson was claiming that he had witnessed a gathering of witches – among them Alizon Device’s younger sister and half-brother, Jennet and William. John and his colleague Richard Shuttleworth had Edmund brought in for questioning and eventually sent 17 people to Lancaster to be tried for witchcraft. All were found guilty but were reprieved by the judge; but by the time an outside investigator had arrived, 4 had already died in the appalling conditions in Lancaster Gaol – Jennet Loynd, Alice Higgin and John Spencer and his wife.52 Gaol records show that two years later Jennet Device was still in prison – her fate, and that of the other suspects, is unknown.53
That is surely the worst horror of all – that Nicholas had turned John into someone who would eventually be responsible for the deaths of at least four people.
Notes
1John Darrell, A True Narration of the Strange and Grievous Vexation by the Devil of Seven Persons in Lancashire (spelling modernized) (London: n.p., 1600). The sources for this case are this pamphlet by the exorcist John Darrell and another by his colleague George More, titled A True Discourse Concerning the Certain Possession and Dispossession of Seven Persons in One Family in Lancashire (spelling modernized) (London: n.p., 1600). Both pamphlets begin with a brief account of what happened before the exorcists’ arrival, based on information from Nicholas Starkie. There are reprints in John Ashton, The Devil in Britain and America (London: Ward & Downey, 1896); and Philip C. Almond, Demonic Possession and Exorcism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
2More, True Discourse.
3Darrell, True Narration.
4More, True Discourse.
5Ibid.
6Unpublished manuscript from the library of the Plymouth artist Robert Lenkiewicz. After his death in 2002 it was auctioned and is now in the Folger Shakespeare Library (ms V.b.26 (2)).
7More, True Discourse.
8Albertus Magnus, attrib., ‘First Book, “Of the Virtues of Certain Herbs”’, in The Book of Secrets of Albertus Magnus (London: n.p., 1604).
9Reginald Scot, The Discovery of Witchcraft (London: n.p., 1584), book 12, chapter 9.
10British Library MS Sloane 962; published in Tony Hunt, Popular Medicine in Thirteenth-Century England (spelling modernized) (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1990), 93.
11Darrell, True Narration.
12Ibid.
13Jonathan Lumby analyses the connection between the two cases (The Lancashire Witch-Craze (Lancaster: Carnegie, 1999)).
14More,
