He went into a little wood not far off from the house, where he made a circle a yard and half around, with many crosses and partitions. When he was finished, he came back to call Master Starkie, telling him what he had done. And he desired him to go and tread out his circle. […] This being also accomplished, he said, ‘Well, now I shall trouble him that troubled me, and be even with him that sought my death.’15
The ritual would almost certainly have involved other elements, such as inscribing words of power and the seals of the spirits around the circle and incantations to invoke their co-operation. But Edmund seems to have realized that Nicholas would be uncomfortable with that kind of magic. However, even his small degree of involvement left Nicholas unnerved by Edmund and his magical practices. He decided to take Edmund and the children for a consultation with someone who had managed to become both an expert on magic and a (fairly) respectable establishment figure: the warden of Christ’s College, Manchester, Dr John Dee.
Over a period of several years, John Dee had regularly conversed with spirits, with the help of Edward Kelley, a ‘scryer’ with a remarkable natural ability for seeing visions in a mirror or crystal. They used an obsidian ritual mirror looted from the Aztecs, a small crystal ball and the Seal of God – a talisman from the medieval book of magic The Sworn Book.16 Since Nicholas was seeking advice on Edmund’s dealings with spirits, it is obvious he must have known about John Dee’s special expertise in this particular area of magic. The meeting took place on 8 December 1596. John Dee was non-committal about the children’s problems although he agreed to see them again in three weeks’ time. However, he ‘sharply reproved’ Edmund.17
This seems to have reassured Nicholas, who no doubt felt that Edmund had been put in his place. It also apparently had a very positive effect on John, who must have found it extremely gratifying to have two magical practitioners now interested in his case. John Dee would have been an impressive figure – elderly, scholarly and authoritative. Furthermore, his criticism of Edmund may in fact have made Edmund an even more intriguing figure to John – someone willing to transgress the rules of the Establishment, to take whatever risks were necessary to possess forbidden knowledge. Over the next three weeks there was such a marked improvement in John’s state of mind – and therefore Nicholas’s too – that when the time came for their return to Manchester, Nicholas stayed at the family home, Cleworth Hall, and entrusted John and Anne to Edmund’s care.
However, Edmund had in fact been seething over John Dee’s insulting treatment. After the children had visited some relatives in Manchester, he refused them permission to go on to John Dee’s house. They defied him and went anyway. Edmund was furious.
He told them, with an angry look, that it had been better for them not to have changed an old friend for a new, with other menacing speeches, and so went before them in a rage, and never came near them all the way home.18
And so, John suddenly found his relationship with Edmund threatened for a second time, a crisis that precipitated his frenzied behaviour on 4 January – his claim that he had been attacked by the Devil and his pyromaniac pillow-throwing episode. John was playing dangerously on his father’s fears of evil spirits. But he needed to create a drastic situation to guarantee Edmund’s continued help. And if Edmund was forced to feel under more of an obligation because of the possibility that he might be responsible, that would be so much the better as far as John was concerned. Not that John would have articulated these motives to himself. On the contrary, he was trapped in a spiral where his emotional turmoil itself became, to him, a symptom of supernatural attack, and that in turn validated his confusion, frustration and panic. And what was really fuelling his torment was the ambivalence of magic. John’s relationship with Edmund was becoming both more compelling and more challenging as Edmund became a progressively more complex figure to John – as he evolved from a priest-like saviour into someone whose power had darker, more dangerous and more transgressive aspects.
Unfortunately, John had allies anxious to support him and follow his lead. He and Anne were not the only children at Cleworth Hall. There were also three girls that Nicholas had taken into the household as companions for his children – two sisters, Margaret and Elizabeth Hardman, who were 14 and 10 years old, respectively, and Elinor Holland, aged 12. John’s behaviour now affected Anne and the other girls as well, and soon all five children were having fits that involved barking and howling and collapsing as if dead. Even in Anne’s case it is unlikely that these involved actual seizures. The idea that they were being attacked by demons had seized the children’s imaginations and entangled them in a complicated mesh of fantasy, collaboration, fear and mischief. But there was now a catastrophic complication. Edmund became romantically involved with Margaret Byrom, a relative of John’s mother, who had been staying with the family for the Christmas festivities. It seems that at first Nicholas simply failed to notice this unthinkable relationship. But not surprisingly Margaret began to suffer from faintness and other stress-related symptoms that would later be interpreted as supernatural in origin.
At the end of January, Margaret was ‘sorely frightened with a terrible vision. It appeared to her, lying in bed […] like a foul black dwarf, with half a face’.19 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