The ravages of King Philip's War, the break-up of families it brought about, and the widespread
feeling that the godly people of New England had somehow become corrupted and were being
punished in consequence, was the long-term background to the Salem witchcraft hysteria of
- The immediate background, however, was a prolonged disruption in the normal
government of the colony. From 1660 onwards, the authorities in England had been taking an
increasing interest in America, and were endeavoring to recover some of the power that had been
carelessly bestowed on the colonists during the early decades. This tendency increased sharply in
the 1680s. In 1684 the crown revoked the original charter of Massachusetts, which gave it self-
government, and in 1686 appointed Sir Edmund Andros (1637-1714) governor. Andros was a
formidable public official who had been sent by James, Duke of York, in 1674 to run his
proprietary colony of New York, seized from the Dutch. He made the place the strategic focus of
England's North American empire, enlarging the anchorage, building warehouses, establishing
an exchange, laying down regulations to foster commerce, and building forts. It has been said,
He found New York a village, he left it a city.’ That was all very well, but Massachusetts wanted to run its own affairs, and the arrival of Andros asGovernor of Our Dominion of New England,' coinciding as it did with the accession
of the Duke of York, now James II and an open Catholic, to the throne, was not welcome in
Boston. It was clear that King James wanted to unite all the northern colonies into one large New
England super-colony, and that Andros was his instrument. When a group of Whig nobles
invited William of Orange to England, to become its Protestant king, and James fled, the New
England elite took the opportunity to stage their ownGlorious Revolution,' put Andros behind bars, and resumed their separate existences. The president of Harvard, Increase Mather (1639- 1723), was sent to London to negotiate a new settlement and charter. It was while he was away doing this that the witch hysteria broke out. It is important to grasp that what, in retrospect, was a breakdown in the rule of law occurred when the entire political frame of New England was in a state of suspension and uncertainty. There was nothing new about witchcraft, or the suspicion of it, in New England. Religious dissidents, such as Quakers, were regularly stripped and examined for its marks. The fear of the witch was linked to fear of the Devil, his or her master, and the Devil was omnipresent in the moral theology of the 17th century. Conviction and hanging of witches was not common in Massachusetts, but it occurred from time to time. In Connecticut we know of ten cases of witches being hanged forfamiliarity with the Devil.' Rhode Island alone had an unblemished record in
this respect. Nor were Calvinists the only people who believed strongly in the reality of sorcery.
Witches were prosecuted in Anglican Virginia. There was a case in Catholic Maryland too,
where a `little old woman,' suspected of being a witch, was cast into the sea to appease an
inexplicably violent storm. What made the Salem case in 1692 unique was the scale and
suddenness of the accusations, the sinister farce of the trials, and the severity of the punishments.
There may be an explanation for this too. The huge religious controversies and wars which
had convulsed Europe from over a century since the outbreak of the Reformation in the 1520s,
came to a climax in the first half of the 17th century, with the appalling Thirty Years War in
central Europe and such marginal catastrophes as the Civil War in Britain. But with the Peace of
Westphalia in 1648, the world slowly turned to secularity. It was as though the volcanic spirit of
religious intolerance had exhausted itself and men were turning to other sources of dispute. But
there were nonetheless periodic convulsions of the dying beast of fanaticism. In the 1680s Louis
XIV, at the urging of Catholic extremists, revoked the toleration for Protestants accorded by the