2. The Possession
John Starkie was the fifth child of Nicholas Starkie and his wife Anne, who was also from one of Lancashire’s most powerful families. John had a younger sister, also called Anne, but the four older brothers and sisters they should have had were dead; all of them had ‘pined away in a most strange manner’2 not long after being born. Although John and his sister had never known them, memories of them must have haunted their parents, and at times it must have been a difficult burden for John and Anne to be the consolation and hope that enabled their parents to live with their grief. There was a further painful complication: their mother had become convinced that the children had died as the result of a curse put upon them by her Roman Catholic relatives. Then, in February 1595, when Anne was 9 or 10 years old and John about 11, Anne began to suffer from seizures.
For parents who had already lost four children, watching Anne suffering from this ‘fearful starting and pulling together of her body’3 was agonizing. John must have been terrified; and not only on his sister’s account. If this was another magical attack by his mother’s embittered relatives, he was in danger too. And yet, he was probably ignored while his parents panicked over Anne. About a week after Anne’s first seizure, all this became too much for John, and he ‘was compelled to shout vehemently, not being able to stop himself’,4 to his parents’ uncomprehending horror. Over the next 10 weeks the children got steadily worse, in spite of Nicholas paying out £200 to various physicians. Then someone recommended ‘Edmund Hartlay – a witch’.5
Folk magic practitioners like Edmund Hartlay were extremely important figures in early modern Europe. The Lenkiewicz Manuscript, a magical notebook from this period, gives an idea of the wide range of services they provided. It included a love spell using a bone from a frog; a spell to force a thief to confess, which involved hammering a nail into a picture of an eye; and an account of how to obtain stones from the stomach of a swallow that would ease childbirth or compel people to do whatever you asked (Figure 1.1).6 However, their most important skill was healing magic. Edmund Hartlay’s methods were typical – a combination of ‘certain Popish charms and herbs’.7 The herbal remedy he used for Anne was probably similar to one included in The Book of Secrets of Albertus Magnus:
This herb [vervain] (as witches say) gathered, the sun being in the sign of the Ram, and put with grain or corn of peony of one year old, healeth them that be sick of the falling sickness.8
It is likely that he also used a widely known charm that invoked the help of the three Magi:
Gaspar fert myrrham, thus Melchior, Balthasar aurum,
Hoec tria qui secum portabit nomina regum,
Solvitur a morbo Christi pietate caduco.9
[Gaspar brought myrrh, Melchior frankincense, Balthasar gold, / Whoever carries the names of these three kings with them, / Will be freed from the falling sickness by the compassion of Christ.]
It is less clear how Edmund would have handled John’s emotional problems. One possibility is a medieval fever charm that was also adapted for a wide range of other purposes:
Archidecline [Lord of the Feast – i.e. Jesus at the Last Supper] sits on high and holds a virgin yard [wand] of hazel in his hand and says, also soth [truly] as the priest makes God’s body in his hands and also soth as God blessed is mother Mary and also soth, I conjure thee, virgin yard of hazel, that thou close and be bote [remedy] of this evil fever to this man [name].10
Whether or not this was the exact charm Edmund used to treat John, it epitomizes the qualities that led to these charms having a very effective psychological impact on patients. The magical practitioner would have been holding a hazel wand as he or she recited the charm, so that the use of direct speech and the present tense not only generated dramatic immediacy but also blurred the distinction between Jesus addressing the wand and the practitioner saying the charm. The effect was to create the impression that the practitioner was Christ’s representative, the channel for his divine healing power. And this is underlined by the way the transformation of the hazel stick into a healing wand is likened to the transformation of bread into the body of Christ during mass. These charms were not innocent tributes to Christian folk traditions. They were profoundly heretical, because through them magical practitioners portrayed themselves as members of a priesthood with the power to bridge the gap between the material and spiritual worlds.
Evidently, this was exactly what John needed – to be the focus of attention of someone charismatic but also subversive, someone who had an aura of power that was very different from the authority and influence of an establishment figure like his father Nicholas. Edmund’s treatment of both children was a complete success – although it is likely that Anne simply outgrew her seizures, which in children are usually linked to a temporary abnormality in brain development. After 18 months Edmund pronounced the children cured and proposed ending his relationship with the family. But he had barely made it down the road before ‘John fell of bleeding’. And ominously, ‘thus it fell out at other times’.11 John was not prepared to have his relationship with Edmund severed. Nicholas offered Edmund an annual payment of £2 in return for his guaranteed ‘assistance in time of need’. But Edmund demanded ‘a house and ground’, which Nicholas refused.12 Suddenly there was tension between the two men. Edmund had no intention of becoming some kind of retainer in the Starkie household, and Nicholas was becoming uncomfortable at his family’s dependence on Edmund. But they were both still at John’s mercy. Nicholas’s response was to take Edmund to Huntroyde, near Pendle Forest in north-east Lancashire, to meet his father and also his uncle Roger Nowell, who would later be the justice of the peace who played a central role in one of England’s most famous witchcraft cases, the 1612 Pendle case (Figure 1.2).13
At some point their discussions must have focused on whether John had been cursed, because on that occasion Edmund ‘was sorely tormented all night long’,