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who had been described by her own husband as “undoubtedly a Witch” and who had already been accused of bewitching at least one woman to death, cursed the girl, who then started to have “strange Fits.” After her siblings too were “tortured every where in a manner so very grievous, that it would have broken an heart of stone to have seen their Agonies,” a prominent Boston doctor concluded that “nothing but an hellish Witchcraft could be the Original of these Maladies.” In spite of the urgings of some that they employ countermagic, the pious parents determined “to oppose Devils with no other weapons but Prayers and Tears.” A day of prayer at their house, held by several clergymen and devout laypeople, freed the youngest child from his fits, but the other children continued to be tormented, until the laundress and her mother were jailed. Thereafter they “had some present ease,” until one of the children was verbally assaulted by a relative of the accused women, whereupon their fits resumed. 63
    When questioned, Goody Glover gave “blasphemous and horrible” responses, declared Mather; and she proved incapable of correctly reciting the Lord’s Prayer no matter how many times it was repeated to her. At her trial before a court convened by the governor, Sir Edmund Andros, and headed by Joseph Dudley—and probably including three of the men who also served as judges in 1692—Glover claimed to speak only Gaelic, so she dealt with the judges through interpreters, even though “she understood the English very well,” Mather insisted. A search of her house turned up “several small Images . . . made of Raggs, and stuff’t with Goat’s hair, and other such Ingredients.” In court, Goody Glover confessed to witchcraft, demonstrating how she tortured the Goodwin children “by wetting of her Finger with her Spittle, and stroaking of those little Images.” When she grasped an image, commonly termed a poppet (or puppet), one of the children “fell into sad Fits, before the whole Assembly.” The judges, concerned about possible deception, repeated the experiment, but with the same result. Before convicting and sentencing Goody Glover to death, the court ordered a group of physicians to examine her to ensure she was not “craz’d.” After the doctors pronounced her sane, she was executed on November 16, declaring ominously that “the Children should not be relieved by her Death, for others had a hand in it as well as she.” 64
    Mather reported in
Memorable Providences
the accuracy of Goody Glover’s prediction that the Goodwins would continue to experience spectral tortures. Yet although the children eventually named other suspected witches, no further arrests and executions occurred. The children occasionally saw specters, but only rarely could they identify specific individuals as causing their afflictions. Mather observed Martha Goodwin carefully, taking her into his own home and later reflecting that her “passions” taught him more about “Demoniacs” than did “all my Library.” And others too had been instructed by her sufferings, because the Goodwin household had been “visited by all sorts of Persons” who witnessed the children’s torments. To Mather, the lesson was clear: only the “Ignorant” would insist on “a Denial of Devils, or of Witches.” His colleagues in other Boston and Charlestown churches concurred. In their jointly authored introduction to
Memorable Providences,
they commented that some people doubted “whether there are any such things as Witches,” but that “no Age passes without some apparent Demonstration of it.” Mather’s book, they contended, provided “a further clear Confirmation, That, There is both a God, and a Devil, and Witchcraft: That, There is no out-ward Affliction, but what God may (and sometimes doth) permit Satan to trouble His people withal. That, The Malice of Satan and his Instruments, is very great against the Children of God.”