I

First, therefore, let us consider the sceptical challenge. There had, of course, been occasional sceptics about witchcraft at an earlier date, particularly Reginald Scot in the Elizabethan period, while iconoclastic views towards supernatural phenomena were sometimes expressed by the radical thinkers who flourished in the Interregnum, thus illustrating the role of radical Protestantism as an initial stimulus to such views.Footnote ⁸ However, it might be felt that a new era began with the sceptical line on such matters taken by Thomas Hobbes in his Leviathan, chapter 45 of which, ‘Of daemonology, and other reliques of the religion of the gentiles’, opened by providing a materialist explanation of apparitions by analogy with the way in which violent pressure on the eye produced the illusion of bright light.Footnote ⁹ Hobbes also, of course, propagated a cynical, manipulative view of human nature and human institutions which at the time was widely seen as corrosive of religion. Worse, his ideas were perceived to be dangerously influential in late seventeenth-century England in the form of what was widely and disparagingly described as ‘Hobbism’, a cynical, libertine outlook which was thought to thrive particularly in the privileged culture of Restoration London, associated especially with the court, the Inns of Court, and the coffee-houses.Footnote ¹⁰

It seems to have been in this fashionable milieu that the sadducism that so concerned Glanvill and others mainly flourished, its oral expression in such settings causing a degree of concern that would hardly seem justified to anyone whose knowledge of the ideas of the period depended solely on the record of printed books.Footnote ¹¹ One of Glanvill's allies, the Presbyterian divine, Richard Baxter, expressed his anxiety about views espoused by ‘the saducees (at court and the Innes of Court)’, while Glanvill's own view was that ‘Saducism is the fashion.’ He associated it with ‘Quiblers and Buffoons that have some little scraps of Learning matcht with a great proportion of Confidence’, commenting: ‘these, Sir, are the Wits (if we will believe them) and their Admirers take every Jest for an Argument, and a loud Laugh, upon an idle Tale of a Devil or a Witch, for a Demonstration of the Non-existence of such Beings’.Footnote ¹² His comments well capture the power of the iconoclastic, deflationary attitudes which seem to have been commonplace in the discourse of educated, metropolitan circles. The identity of the figures who expressed such views unfortunately generally remains obscure, but we occasionally hear of known individuals who held sadducist opinions: for instance, Samuel Pepys's colleague, the courtier and diplomat Lord Sandwich, was ‘very scepticall’ about the supposed activity of spirits, combining this with comparable heterodoxy in his religious views;Footnote ¹³ a similar scepticism is to be found in the physician and virtuoso, Walter Charleton, who, it was reported, ‘laughes att the Notion of Spirrits’.Footnote ¹⁴

In both instances, this scepticism was directed towards a notorious witchcraft case of the early 1660s which in fact formed the centrepiece of Glanvill's apologetic work, the so-called ‘drummer of Tedworth’, a poltergeist-type phenomenon which afflicted the house of John Mompesson, a Wiltshire landowner and militia officer, with knockings and other strange sounds and smells. Indeed, similar attitudes were displayed by certain of those who visited Mompesson's house to witness the phenomenon, as reported by Mompesson himself. These ‘Gentlemen [from] afarre off’ openly acknowledged ‘their diffidence of the being of Spirits’ to two ministers who were at the house, and they appeared amused when the spirit failed to arrive as expected. Subsequently, when the knocking began as forecast, they searched the room for ‘any secret Angles or holes where any body might be put to make noises to deceive them’, asking Mompesson's leave to pull up the floor boards. They also ‘calld out Satan, Doe this, and that, and, Whistle if thou canst, or let us see whether thou canst tell money, or make chaires dance, as we have heard, let us see it’. Mompesson was evidently rather shocked by their irreverent demeanour, as also by the fact that they ‘departed with some kind of suspicion that what they heard was onely a cheat or a fancy’. In this vivid vignette, we again see the prevalent sadducism in action.Footnote ¹⁵

There were, of course, a few books that put forward sadducist opinions in print, and these included such learned tomes as John Webster's The displaying of supposed witchcraft (1677) and Balthasar Bekker's De betoverde weereld, ‘The world bewitched’ (1691–3) – though Bekker's book has never been translated into English in full and evidently had little impact on this side of the channel, in contrast to the furore that it caused on the continent.Footnote ¹⁶ It is revealing, however, that, even when the orthodox antagonists of sadducist ideas sought to refute such serious-minded authors, they tried rather inappropriately to conflate them with the iconoclastic, dismissive attitude of the ‘wits’ with whom they predominantly associated sadducism, complaining in Webster's case of ‘the elusory cavils of that profane Buffoon’, and in Bekker's of his ‘obstinate Prepossessions’ and ‘self presuming Conceit’.Footnote ¹⁷ In fact, there is only one published work which seems to come close to the iconoclastic oral sadducism that was evidently so widespread at the time, and this is a much more ephemeral-looking volume, The question of witchcraft debated, by John Wagstaffe, a quintessential ‘wit’ of the kind with which the coffee-houses were filled. This ‘sweepingly sceptical performance’, in Keith Thomas's words, dismissed witchcraft on the grounds ‘That Politique interest hath founded it on fables [which] discover themselves to be so, by their impossibility.’Footnote ¹⁸ Wagstaffe also associated the prevalence of witchcraft with ‘priestcraft’, and he was clearly of slightly questionable religious orthodoxy – the kind of free-thinker with whom the orthodox apprehensively associated sadducist views, hence underlining the dangerous affiliations of the ideas about witchcraft that he put forward.

It is interesting that, after being published in 1669 and reissued in an expanded edition in 1671, Wagstaffe's book then had a prolonged afterlife as a bold and succinct statement of a sadducist position. In conjunction with the famous Jane Wenham case in 1712, it was drawn on almost in its entirety in more than one publication, since it provided a critique of witchcraft beliefs with a punchy and cynical tone that was more suited to the media of the period than would have been the case with an older work like that of the Elizabethan Reginald Scot.Footnote ¹⁹ Subsequently, it was reprinted yet again as the only statement of a sceptical position to be published in conjunction with the repeal of the parliamentary act against witchcraft in 1736.Footnote ²⁰ Wagstaffe thus gave printed expression to views that were otherwise mainly orally expressed: but that did not make them any the less worrying to the orthodox, since they were seen as a dangerous assault on a key part of Christian doctrine, representing a prelude to an attack on Christianity as a whole. As Glanvill put it, ‘those that dare not bluntly say, There is no god, content themselves (for a fair step, and Introduction) to deny there are spiritsor witches’.Footnote ²¹

II

It was for this reason that in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century a striking amount of effort was put into refuting such views. There was an unprecedented backlash against fashionable sadducism, in the course of which an attempt was made to use empirical means to vindicate the reality of witchcraft and related phenomena against such sceptical attack. The tradition was begun by the Cambridge Platonist, Henry More, in his Antidote against atheism (1653), book 3 of which retailed a series of cases of witchcraft and the like in a manner which has sometimes embarrassed modern scholars trying to stress More's credentials as a serious philosopher.Footnote ²² More's work was continued by his protégé Glanvill in the work which went through various recensions from the mid-1660s onwards, starting as A philosophical endeavour towards the defence of the being of witches and apparitions (1666), continuing as A blow against modern sadducism (1668), and ending in Saducismus triumphatus, the posthumous compilation edited on Glanvill's behalf by More. One component of Glanvill's book was an essay which sought to defend witchcraft in terms of the epistemology of the new science, arguing that it was unreasonable to deny ‘matters of fact’ on a priori grounds by analogy with our nescience as to how other provable phenomena occur, such as the formation of a foetus in the womb or a plant in the earth. But this was combined with an increasingly long series of case-histories, of which that concerning Tedworth was the first and most prominent, which Glanvill justified on the grounds that such empirical accounts comprised ‘the proofs that come nearest the sence’. The 1668 and subsequent recensions of the book also included a section which speaks volumes about the milieu where Glanvill saw the scepticism that concerned him as flourishing, entitled: A whip for the droll, fidler to the atheist: being reflections on drollery and atheism.Footnote ²³

Glanvill was not alone in such efforts. The Anglican divine, Meric Casaubon, published a pair of volumes Of credulity and incredulity, in things natural, civil and divine in 1668 and 1670, and lesser works of a similar kind included Richard Bovet's Pandæmonium (1684).Footnote ²⁴ A further example is provided by the scientist, Robert Boyle, who was also profoundly concerned with the defence of Christianity against irreligious threats; though in general he went about this by invoking God's overall design in creating and supervising a mechanistic universe, he, too, saw empirical evidence of the reality of what he described as ‘supernatural’ phenomena as crucial to the apologetic effort. One of the earliest publications for which Boyle was responsible was an English translation of The devil of Mascon, an account of supposed diabolical activity in southern France in 1612, published in 1658, and he was later in correspondence with Glanvill about the latter's witchcraft project. Boyle also took a particular interest in the strange phenomenon of second sight as found in the Scottish Highlands, the uncanny ability of certain individuals to foresee future events, which was (in his words) ‘a thinge, that not only is not to be met with in the course of Nature but is not to be matched in the books of Magick, I have hitherto read’.Footnote ²⁵ Second sight was to figure in a collection of ‘Supernaturall phænomena’ that Boyle made in his later years – also including witchcraft, apparitions, predictions, a ‘Magicall Glass’ and the like – which was itself to form part of a work entitled Strange reports, the overt aim of which, like Glanvill's work, was apologetic.

Though Strange reports was never published in full, due initially to prevarication on Boyle's part and then to his death in 1691, his motives in compiling it are clear from the sections of its prefatory material which until recently survived only in manuscript. In them, Boyle explained how

He continued by justifying his collection of empirical examples of such occurrences on the grounds that

What is particularly interesting is how overtly Boyle differentiates ‘supernatural’ phenomena from natural ones, since he explicitly divided Strange reports into two sections, one ‘relating to things purely Natural’, the other ‘consisting of Phænomena, that are, or seem to be, of a Supernatural Kind or Order’. Previously, thinkers had often used a rather confused category of the ‘preternatural’ which straddled the natural and the supernatural, and witchcraft and similar phenomena had frequently been placed in that. Boyle, however, used ‘preternatural’ simply to describe phenomena that were natural but out of the ordinary, including monsters and other aberrations, and he was quite explicit about the existence of a separate ‘supernatural’ realm, albeit one that was no less susceptible to empirical demonstration.Footnote ²⁷ This new clarity of demarcation is a significant facet of the thought of Boyle's period, and it is interesting to find it echoed in his Royal Society colleague, John Aubrey, who in 1694 consciously removed material from the chapter on ‘Accidents’ in his Natural history of Wiltshire – a typical mixture of unusual phenomena and others clearly above nature of the kind that had traditionally been encapsulated by the intermediate concept of the preternatural – instead, putting the items in question into a separate work, his Miscellanies of 1696.Footnote ²⁸ This dealt with topics like omens and portents, apparitions, prophecies, second sight, magic, and ‘transportation by an invisible power’, and it is clear that this was because Aubrey thought that such phenomena had a commonality in distinction to the rest of the subject matter of a work like The natural history of Wiltshire.

III

Aubrey's effort was sui generis in that it was surprisingly non-apologetic compared with those of Boyle and Glanvill, but otherwise comparable works with an explicitly apologetic purpose continued to be produced after the deaths of such men into the 1690s and beyond. The Presbyterian divine, Richard Baxter, published a similar set of narratives as The certainty of the worlds of spirits in 1691, thus illustrating an alliance of Anglicans and nonconformists in confronting the irreligious threat – a threat that was clearly seen as worth attacking even at the price of inviting accusations of ‘enthusiasm’ in doing so.Footnote ²⁹ There is also the Anglican cleric, William Turner's, Compleat history of the most remarkable providences both of judgement and mercy which have hapned in this present age (1697), though this was somewhat broader in its remit.Footnote ³⁰ In the years around 1700, perhaps the leading clerical demonologist was Edward Fowler, bishop of Gloucester. Fowler had contributed a number of stories to the posthumous edition of Glanvill's Saducismus triumphatis and he seems effectively to have been Glanvill's heir, a doubty defender of the supernatural who encouraged the recording and dissemination of much material of this kind, though he never published a collection like Glanvill's and only scattered hints survive of such activity on his part.Footnote ³¹ It was Fowler who provided a letter of encouragement which was prefixed to a further collection of supernatural phenomena of which it is appropriate to give an account here, since it seems to have been the last of the great apologetic collections of empirical material of this kind, though it has hitherto been overlooked because it is no longer extant.Footnote ³² This was by Yorkshire virtuoso and antiquary, Ralph Thoresby.

Thoresby is well known for his history of Leeds, Ducatus Leodiensis (1715), to which was appended a complete listing of his celebrated collection of natural and artificial rarities, books, and manuscripts, and a full-length modern study of him is long overdue. He is a fascinating example of the kind of provincial figure inspired by the Royal Society in its second generation, an assiduous contributor to the Philosophical Transactions of articles concerning antiquities, natural curiosities, strange weather phenomena and the like. His collection, though sadly entirely dispersed, was extraordinary, probably the most remarkable in its day after Sir Hans Sloane's, and one of its notable features was a pioneering collection of autographs.Footnote ³³ Thoresby combined his interest in natural history and antiquities with deep piety, as had such earlier exemplars of the natural historical tradition that inspired him as Boyle and John Ray. He owed much to the puritan tradition of spirituality which had flourished in seventeenth-century England, as exemplified by various divines with whom he had contact or whose manuscripts he copied or inherited, such as Henry Sampson or Oliver Heywood.Footnote ³⁴ This is strongly reflected in the diary that Thoresby kept for much of his life, and still more so in the ‘Review’ that he started to compile from it in 1710, which was a kind of spiritual autobiography.Footnote ³⁵

Thoresby's debt to the natural historical tradition of the Royal Society is seen not least in an ‘appendix’ to his history of Leeds, which supplemented the antiquarian account of the neighbourhood given in the main body of the book by giving an account ‘Of unusual accidentsthat have attended some persons’ – strange births, abnormally long lives, and other strange phenomena. This was rather similar to the comparable chapter in Aubrey's Natural history of Wiltshire, though in Thoresby's case his avowed example was the chapter on ‘Men and women’ in Robert Plot's Natural history of Oxford-shire (1677).Footnote ³⁶ Equally important, however, was a second compilation by Thoresby which was quite distinct from this and it is this which is relevant here, despite the fact that it does not survive: indeed, no one seems even to have been aware of it prior to my researches for this article, partly because it has sometimes been confused with the appendix to Ducatus Leodiensis. The work in question was a collection of supernatural phenomena, clearly described in Thoresby's unpublished ‘Review’ as comprising ‘some memorable wel attested narrativs of apparitions & preternatural occurances’ (the published diary is more ambiguous in its wording).Footnote ³⁷ It is perhaps worth noting in passing how we have now come such a distance from the traditional, intermediate concept of the ‘preternatural’ that Thoresby uses the word as a synonym for ‘supernatural’, and this is symptomatic of the way in which the word was increasingly used thereafter.Footnote ³⁸

The intention of the work was to defend the reality of the supernatural realm against the fashionable sadducees who were as much in evidence in the early years of the eighteenth century as they had been in the Restoration. Indeed, when Edward Fowler provided Thoresby with the letter of encouragement which was prefixed to the collection, he urged him to publish it ‘for the conviction of sceptical people in this Infidel Age’.Footnote ³⁹ At the same time, he also gave him ‘some remarkable narratives of spirits’, together with a copy of a comparable book by the Somerset virtuoso, John Beaumont, his Historical, physiological and theological treatise of spirits, apparitions, witchcrafts and other magical practices (1705), ‘which his lordship told me had done much good, and particularly had set to rights a friend of his, (Mr or Dr Burnet, of the Charterhouse) who had formerly been an unbeliever in that case’.Footnote ⁴⁰ This is evidently a reference to the notorious divine, Thomas Burnet, who had acquired a reputation for heterodoxy due to the questionable geological views that he had put forward in his Sacred theory of the earth (1681–9) and that were subsequently taken up by free-thinkers like Charles Blount – though Thoresby's reference to him in this connection is puzzling, since Burnet had in fact collaborated with Fowler in 1698 in publishing a case in which premonitory dreams led to the discovery of a murderer.Footnote ⁴¹ If Thoresby's account was slightly garbled, it nevertheless further illustrates how sceptical ideas on such subjects were commonly associated with figures of questionable orthodoxy.

It is frustrating that the Thoresby collection is now lost, but some idea of its likely content is available from materials that are extant, particularly Thoresby's extracts from the diaries of Oliver Heywood and the ‘daybook’ of Henry Sampson which survive in the British Library (the latter is also the source of some of our knowledge of Fowler's interest in such matters); he also made notes on Turner's Compleat history of … providences.Footnote ⁴² The Heywood extracts include various strange and prodigious phenomena such as apparitions, while the extracts from Sampson's daybook have more of the same: premonitions of death and other apparitions; sudden deaths, deliverances, and visions; instances of diabolical possession and haunted houses; and a case of witchcraft at Honiton in Devon. It is interesting that Thoresby's notes show that he sometimes had parallel accounts of the same occurrences, including the case of the famous Surey demoniac, exorcized by Thomas Jolly and other Presbyterian ministers in Lancashire in 1689–90, thus providing further evidence of the content of his lost compilation.Footnote ⁴³ It seems likely that some letters to Thoresby that reported comparable phenomena can also be linked to it.Footnote ⁴⁴

The loss of Thoresby's collection is the more poignant because, had it survived, it would in a sense have been the last great work of demonology, a collection of supernatural phenomena that would have been a worthy companion to his collections on other subjects. Indeed, in some ways it might in his eyes have seemed even more important, because, valuable as those other collections might have been in their way, the apologetic purpose underlying this would have made it the ultimate collection, with the accumulative skills of the scientist and antiquary being enrolled in the defence of religion itself. From his diary and other sources, Thoresby comes across as a pious, well-intentioned figure, who straddles the nonconformist–Anglican divide in that in 1699 he abandoned his dissenting roots and conformed with the established church; he also clearly relished his liaison with the great and good in religious and intellectual circles. It is thus revealing that he seems to have seen it almost as a public duty to undertake the defence of the supernatural realm against those who questioned its existence.

IV

Thoresby also illustrates the stimulus to such activity on his part through certain striking passages in his diary in which he recorded encounters with sceptics about supernatural phenomena: these took place during the very visit to London in the summer of 1712 when he records that he began his collection and Fowler contributed his letter to it, and they clearly made a marked impression on him. The episodes in question took place in coffee-houses where, now as in the late seventeenth century, it was notorious that such risqué ideas were likeliest to be voiced: indeed, the first of these passages has been widely cited to illustrate how shocked the orthodox were by the heterodox opinions on such subjects that they there heard.Footnote ⁴⁵ On 21 August 1712, Thoresby wrote:

The other confrontation was a little earlier, on 13 June 1712, and it involved a man named Obadiah Oddy whom Thoresby had earlier recorded meeting in a coffee-house on the previous day. Thoresby wrote:

Quite how the June and August episodes relate to one another is unclear. The fact that no reference is made to Oddy on the later occasion suggests that on that date Thoresby encountered a separate group of thinkers expressing views that shocked him, perhaps indicating how widely such ideas were expressed in the coffee-houses of the day. As for Thoresby's account of Oddy, what is perhaps most notable about it is how explicit Thoresby is about the progressive nature of Oddy's scepticism about the supernatural realm, from opposition to the truth of well-attested supernatural narratives to a complete denial of the reality of the devil. In fact, although the diary references to Oddy occur on consecutive days, the implication is that Thoresby had been aware of him for longer, hence observing the progression from mild to extreme scepticism that he describes.

It is worth noting that, during this trip to London, Thoresby also recorded both in the diary and the ‘Review’ a meeting with William Whiston, the protégé of Newton who became notorious for his public expression of Arian views, and who was to be ousted from his Lucasian chair at Cambridge for his heterodoxy. What is interesting about this further confrontation with the advanced ideas which thrived in London circles is that in this case Thoresby's tone is more assured, suggesting that the encounter failed to upset him to the extent that was the case with his meetings with sadducees. Thoresby explained how, as usual, he approached Whiston to obtain his autograph for his collection, continuing:

Similarly revealing is an encounter between Thoresby and another heterodox figure, the deist John Toland, three years later, when Toland praised Thoresby's Ducatus Leondiensis in a letter to him; in responding, though appropriately gratified, Thoresby could not resist adding a rather smug reproof of Toland's heterodoxy.Footnote ⁴⁹ Again, the tone he adopted was notably assured, lacking the almost visceral anxiety apparent in his meetings with sadducees.

Here it is worth focusing on the sadducee who did shock Thoresby, Obadiah Oddy, a man about whom it is possible to find out a good deal although he has almost completely vanished from the historical record. Oddy's life was devoted to classical scholarship. An associate of the great scholar, Richard Bentley, Oddy aspired to produce a definitive edition of the Greek historian, Dio Cassius, one of the key sources for the history of the late Republic and early Roman Empire; his scholarly preoccupations are well illustrated by a series of notebooks purchased after his death by the earl of Oxford which are now in the Harleian collection in the British Library.Footnote ⁵⁰ Oddy was also friendly with the Oxford antiquary, Thomas Hearne, who describes him in his diaries as ‘a very hard Student, has Excellent natural Parts, is a great master of the Greek Tongue & very well skill'd in Sacred & Prophane History’, while a number of telling letters from Oddy to Hearne and others survive, mainly in the Bodleian Library.Footnote ⁵¹ These reveal Oddy as rather a spirited, raffish figure, in contrast to the earnest, slightly humourless Thoresby: on one occasion, for instance, he sent Hearne a ‘Dithyrambick Rhodomontade, as writ over a Glasse, on purpose to make you laugh’.Footnote ⁵² It is also apparent that Oddy, whose father had been a Presbyterian minister, had become what Hearne calls ‘an irreligious Latitudinarian’.Footnote ⁵³ Moreover, he showed a degree of tolerance towards Islam that shocked Hearne, and the fact that he was later to commit suicide perhaps displayed libertarian tendencies on his part of a kind which Hearne deprecated.Footnote ⁵⁴

The source of the sadducism that disquieted Thoresby is apparent from Oddy's notebooks, which are littered with anti-clerical sentiments and sceptical comments about ‘credulity’; they also contain notes from the iconoclastic works by the Dutch scholar, Anthonie van Dale, his De oraculis ethnicorum dissertationes duæ (1683) and his De origine ac progressu idolatriae et superstitionum (1696), the former the source of Fontenelle's more famous critique of pagan oracles and also a key inspiration for the witchcraft sceptic, Balthasar Bekker.Footnote ⁵⁵ Indeed, the case of Oddy – like that of John Wagstaffe a generation earlier – suggests that classical learning was a potential source for sadducism, and that, in the emerging Augustan age, this is a stimulus to intellectual change that we ignore at our peril. Of course, classical erudition was not new, but at this time it was becoming increasingly apparent how it could serve heterodox ends as easily as orthodox ones;Footnote ⁵⁶ it thus provided a potential resource for those with a proclivity to such scepticism as Oddy clearly exemplifies. As for the metropolitan milieu in which Thoresby encountered him, Oddy's letters to Hearne suggest that he was somewhat disdainful of it, complaining how it was characterized by ‘a state of Ignorance, accompanied with Abundance of pride’ and on one occasion reporting how ‘Yesterday in Company where I was, I heard an Asse upon Record cry'd up, for a Man of the greatest learning in the World.’Footnote ⁵⁷ Yet he clearly enjoyed himself there, and the likely trickle-down effect of a combination of iconoclasm and erudition like his is not to be underestimated.

V

In Oddy we therefore have another telling vignette of a sadducee, while in his confrontation with Thoresby we see a continuation of the polarization between believers and sceptics that we encountered in the late seventeenth century, with orally expressed sadducism stimulating apologetic works which sought to refute such views by the accumulation of empirical examples. Indeed, it might almost be felt that by this point matters had reached something of a stalemate. Scepticism about witchcraft and associated beliefs was clearly commonplace in coffee-houses and comparable venues, as Thoresby's remarks in his diary imply. In addition, though Wagstaffe's treatise continued to hold the field as the main full-length exposition of sadducism (hence explaining the reprints of it at this time), it is possible to find authors who gave briefer printed expression to such views in the form of the deists – men like the 3rd earl of Shaftesbury, who was damning of all kinds of superstition in his Characteristics of men, manners, opinions, times (1711), where he ridiculed Bishop Fowler for his interest in supernatural phenomena; or Anthony Collins, who argued in his Discourse of free-thinking (1713) that the devil's ‘Dominion and Power’ were ‘ever more or less extensive, as Free-Thinking is discourag'd or allow'd’; or John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, who devoted three whole numbers of their free-thinking journal, Cato's letters, to excoriating ‘superstitious Fears’, including ‘a further Detection of the vulgar Absurdities about Ghosts and Witches’.Footnote ⁵⁸

On the other hand, it is important to stress that, for more orthodox thinkers, the very fact that heterodox authors like these were so open in their denial of such phenomena continued to be problematic in that it tainted such views with overtones of ‘atheism’ and made them difficult to adopt. This is seen, for instance, in one of the more sceptical pamphlets inspired by the Jane Wenham case, A full confutation of witchcraft, the anonymous author of which specifically stated how ‘in all popular Errors, if we discover the least Incredulity, we run the Risque of being taken for Men of no Religion’.Footnote ⁵⁹ It is thus hardly surprising that 1715 saw the publication of a further apologetic work, Richard Boulton's Compleat history of magick, sorcery and witchcraft, which yet again sought to use narratives of witchcraft to confute sadducist claims – even if, like other compilations made at the behest of the booksellers by the same author, an impoverished medical man, it was not a work of any great depth.Footnote ⁶⁰ In practice, it is clear that the orthodox consensus remained in favour of the reality of witchcraft, or at least in favour of staying neutral on the subject, well into the eighteenth century. This proclivity has been stressed earlier in this article, and it is displayed perhaps most clearly by that influential arbiter of fashionable opinion, Joseph Addison in The Spectator, who specifically advocated that witchcraft was a subject ‘in which a Man should stand Neuter’: though admitting that he could ‘give no Credit to any Particular Instance of it’, he nevertheless continued to aver that ‘I believe in general that there is and has been such a thing as Witch-craft.’Footnote ⁶¹

Equally, however, there can be no doubt that witchcraft and related beliefs were increasingly at odds with the world of early Augustan England, and with the confident acceptance of a universe operating according to predictable, Newtonian principles, in conjunction with an increasingly stable and orderly political and social milieu. Here the case of Obadiah Oddy is revealing, since his notebooks contain not only extracts from learned works but also from Newton's Principia, which he read in a discriminating way, singling out passages that seemed to him especially crucial.Footnote ⁶² It is also interesting to find him making notes on the writings of the German jurist, Samuel Puffendorf, whose project for desacralizing civil philosophy he evidently found attractive, while he was a supporter of the Hanoverian succession.Footnote ⁶³ In this connection, it is worth noting a critique of Addison's comments in The Spectator by the author who adapted Wagstaffe's The question of witchcraft debated as a commentary on the Jane Wenham case, probably William Pittis. The extracts from Wagstaffe's book originally appeared in the journal, The Protestant Post-Boy, and in one of the issues involved, their editor deliberately called Addison's bluff, aping The Spectator in providing a motto from Horace (in fact, a quotation that Addison had himself used in a similar context) and challenging Addison's decision to ‘stand Neuter’ concerning witchcraft. Instead, he argued that in such passages Horace had ‘laid it down as a Mark or Token of a Man's Proficiency in Moral Philosophy, if he had learn'd to dispise and laugh at such kind of Fables as my last was written to expose’.Footnote ⁶⁴

Moreover, the compatibility of scepticism with a cosmic optimism of an essentially classical kind is well captured by Addison himself in the very issue of The Spectator in which he used the same quotation from Horace. In it, he excoriated a variety of superstitions, from monitory dreams to spilled salt, reflecting ‘on the Evils that attend these superstitious Follies of Mankind; how they subject us to imaginary Afflictions, and additional Sorrows that do not properly come within our Lot’, and adding: ‘as it is the chief Concern of Wise-Men, to retrench the Evils of Life by the Reasonings of Philosophy; it is the Employment of Fools, to multiply them by the Sentiments of Superstition’.Footnote ⁶⁵ It might be felt that it was only a matter of time before the orthodox saw the incompatibility of magical beliefs with the outlook that such comments reflect.

This therefore is the background against which one can start to observe a process by which, gradually and slightly timidly, the orthodox came round to adopting the scepticism that had been pioneered by the free-thinkers and that they had previously rejected as dangerous. Among the factors involved, one was a kind of myth that the Royal Society had played a positive role in testing and rejecting magical beliefs.Footnote ⁶⁶ In fact, despite the interest in magical phenomena of individual Fellows like Boyle and Glanvill, the society as an institution had rather pusillanimously avoided the discussion of such topics in its early years: yet this avoidance now proved surprisingly influential insofar as it had the effect of marginalizing such concerns from the remit of natural philosophy. This can be illustrated by an exchange between the conformist scholar Richard Bentley and the deist Anthony Collins over the passage in Collins's Discourse of free-thinking in which he correctly linked free-thought with articulate scepticism about witchcraft. For Bentley rejected such claims, responding: ‘What then has lessen'd in England your stories of Sorceries? Not the growing Sect [of Free-thinkers] but the Growth of Philosophy and Medicine. No thanks to Atheists, but to the Royal Society and College of Physicians; to the Boyle's and Newton's, the Sydenham's and Ratcliff's.’Footnote ⁶⁷ In this, Bentley was breathtakingly and arrogantly wrong: we have already seen how Boyle took a diametrically opposite position, and the other figures Bentley named made no public utterances on the subject at all.Footnote ⁶⁸ But one can see how he thus provided a reassuring establishmentarian pedigree for ideas that might otherwise seem dangerously heterodox.

VI

Much the same is true of Francis Hutchinson in his Historical essay concerning witchcraft (1718) – long acclaimed as a turning point in being a book by an orthodox thinker which took a sceptical line regarding witchcraft – since he similarly invoked the Royal Society, in this case in a slightly odd digression to his account of the notorious trial and acquittal of Jane Wenham for witchcraft in 1712. Hutchinson also sought ‘principles’ for assessing the plausibility of witchcraft and related beliefs, and he has been acclaimed a pioneer in using probability theory to evaluate testimony on such topics, even if it was primarily through examining historical instances that he did so.Footnote ⁶⁹ But, since his book has long been seen as pivotal in making scepticism acceptable to the orthodox, it is worth focusing on him to try both to understand what factors underlay this key change, and to explore how far thinkers like him were now speaking the language previously espoused by the heterodox. In fact, Hutchinson seems to have drafted his Historical essay long before it was finally published in 1718, exploring the possibility of publishing it in 1707 and then again in 1712 in connection with the Jane Wenham affair.Footnote ⁷⁰ It is interesting that on the first occasion we learn that the book was frowned on by the church authorities. The specific reason given for its suppression at that point was that it might upset the Scots at the time of the impending Union, Scottish opinion being notoriously conservative on such matters: this was a shrewd move, since, as the author of a sermon in support of the Union, Hutchinson was hardly likely to demur. On the other hand, it seems likely that what was really at stake was the broader embarrassment over the issue of witchcraft which affected many churchmen, who preferred instead to endorse an Addisonian neutrality on the topic.Footnote ⁷¹

The long gestation of Hutchinson's ideas on the subject make their initial stimulus a little hard to divine. It is possible, as his recent biographer has suggested, that he first came to feel strongly on such matters as a result of his personal experience of a witchcraft case in 1694 while he was a cleric at Bury St Edmunds; this might have been the stimulus to the special study that he made of the notorious Matthew Hopkins witch-hunt in East Anglia half a century earlier.Footnote ⁷² But Hutchinson's feelings were clearly enhanced by the Wenham case in 1712, which more than ever exemplified the ignorance and credulity that he saw as characterizing popular witch beliefs, resulting, in his view, in ‘great trouble & disturbance, not only to the poor old Creatures, but to all timerous Persons, & the whole Neighbourhoods where they are’.Footnote ⁷³ Some historians have seen the Wenham trial as pivotal because of the extent to which it politicized witch beliefs and thereby discredited them, and it certainly had political overtones locally, while some of the pamphlets published in connection with it were highly partisan in tone.Footnote ⁷⁴ But it might be argued that what was more crucial was the extent to which it accentuated the incompatibility between traditional witch beliefs of the kind which surfaced in the trial and its aftermath and the critical and prudentialist ethos of the period to which Hutchinson gave expression.

In Hutchinson's case, further evidence on the evolution of his views is provided by his opposition to the so-called French Prophets, who had come from the Cévennes claiming miraculous powers, and who achieved a significant following in London in the first decade of the eighteenth century (though this diminished when they predicted that one of their converts, Thomas Emes, would rise from the dead and he failed to do so). Hutchinson's attack on them, entitled A short view of the pretended spirit of prophecy (1708), argued that ‘a great part of them are crafty Impostors’.Footnote ⁷⁵ The French Prophets were disconcerting not least because they did not simply represent the forces of popular superstition but gained support from people of high status; it was partly for this reason that Hutchinson went out of his way to present them as implicitly subversive and destabilizing of the status quo.Footnote ⁷⁶ Equally important, as Hillel Schwartz has pointed out in his study of the opposition to the Prophets, was the contrast among their critics between an older generation – including Edward Fowler – who accepted that the Prophets had supernatural gifts but ascribed these to the devil rather than God, and men like Hutchinson who combined this with a much more naturalistic line, attributing their behaviour to medical symptoms or to deception.Footnote ⁷⁷ Indeed, Hutchinson used his book as an opportunity to try to discredit claims to supernatural powers more generally, including a lengthy section attacking a series of supposed prophets and illuminati, from John Dee to Sabbatai Sevi, in a manner that would have made Edward Fowler rather uncomfortable but would have delighted deists like the earl of Shaftesbury.Footnote ⁷⁸

When it comes to Hutchinson's book on witchcraft, however, what is most significant about it is the extent to which he felt that in it he was negotiating a route between Scylla and Charybdis, between superstition on the one hand, and a dangerous degree of scepticism on the other: this has been missed in most previous scholarly accounts of Hutchinson because the authors in question failed to take account of the pioneering free-thinking tradition of scepticism surveyed in this article, and the extent to which this inhibited similar attitudes on the part of the orthodox.Footnote ⁷⁹ Hutchinson's book is set out as a dialogue between a jury-man, an ‘advocate’ from Scotland, and a clergyman who clearly speaks for Hutchinson. At the start of the ‘Conclusion’, the jury-man refers to one of the books published in connection with the Wenham case, The impossibility of witchcraft – in other words the reprint of John Wagstaffe's earlier sceptical work – and says to the clergyman: ‘I do not remember, that in any part of our Dialogue you have ventur'd so far: And therefore some will think that in several Parts you have been too cautious, and left Things too doubtful.’ The clergyman replies: ‘I had rather err on that Hand than the other … There is something doubtful in all Subjects’, and he was at pains to stress that his argument was about the weakness of the evidence against most accused witches rather than the reality of a diabolical realm as a whole.Footnote ⁸⁰

Moreover, Hutchinson refers more than once in his book to more extreme stances than his own, and to the extent to which even a moderate position like his had formerly been inhibited by ‘fear of loose People carrying the Notion too far the other way’.Footnote ⁸¹ It was also for this reason that he appended to his treatise a sermon ‘in Proof of the Christian Religion’ and another asserting the existence of good and bad angels, which were explicitly aimed to refute ‘the Free-Thinkers of our Age’.Footnote ⁸² Hence it is not surprising that the deists, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, in their more radical dismissal of witch beliefs in Cato's letters a few years later, were somewhat disdainful of Hutchinson, describing him as ‘the worthy Dr Hutchinson’, and referring rather patronizingly to ‘what he hath with great piety and judgment published upon this subject’.Footnote ⁸³

VII

Hutchinson's book is therefore a testimony to a point at which a moderate scepticism about witchcraft came to be acceptable because outright belief in the phenomenon seemed more dangerous than outright disbelief in it. Hutchinson was content to go part of the way down the sceptical route of the free-thinkers because the alternative was the disruptive enthusiasm represented by the popular uproar over the Jane Wenham case or that associated with the French Prophets. And this was not an act of political partisanship: it was not because Hutchinson was a whig that he adopted this view, as had been claimed in certain recent accounts of witch beliefs in this period, which arguably have greatly overestimated their party-political nature.Footnote ⁸⁴ Hutchinson's decision to critique witch beliefs was a matter of conviction which if anything hindered his career rather than enhancing it.Footnote ⁸⁵ Moreover, a revealing analogue to Hutchinson's book has come to light in the form of a bibliographical account of witchcraft which bears some similarity to the relevant sections of his, comparably associating such beliefs with ignorance and superstition: yet this was written not by a whig but by a Jacobite, the scholar and book collector, Thomas Rawlinson.Footnote ⁸⁶

The surviving manuscript is in the Morrab Library, Penzance, and it represents a slightly surprising initiative on Rawlinson's part, since, although he furnished materials for use by others, he never published a book of his own; this makes it all the more striking that he was apparently inspired to do so on the subject of witchcraft, though the extant text is unfortunately not very explicit about his reasons for doing so.Footnote ⁸⁷ Rawlinson's text was compiled after Hutchinson's, which had gone into a second edition in 1720 and to which Rawlinson refers, and it was possibly because it covered some of the same ground that Rawlinson's work never got into print – though, since only a fragment survives, comprising two sections of text describing witchcraft publications of the 1640s and a more expansive preface, it may never have been completed.Footnote ⁸⁸ In a letter to Rawlinson dated 17 September 1722 which is quoted in the preface, however, Samuel Weller, vicar of Maidstone in Kent, told him not only that he was ‘extreamly pleas'd with the reading of’ Hutchinson's book, but also that the volume that Rawlinson hoped to publish would do ‘a great deal of real Service to the World’.Footnote ⁸⁹ Like Hutchinson's, the tone of Rawlinson's text is sceptical: ‘the unhappy notions of the absurd Power of Witches to hurt both Man & Beast’ that had flourished in the mid-seventeenth century were associated with ‘the credulous & weak Teachers of those Times’.Footnote ⁹⁰ Though the scale of Rawlinson's extant effort is minor compared with Hutchinson's, this unanimity of a nonjuring Jacobite with a whig bishop illustrates how, at last, scepticism about witchcraft had escaped from its dangerous affiliations with free-thinking to become an acceptable viewpoint for more orthodox thinkers of various hues.

Hence, in the years around 1720 we find disparate thinkers adopting a sceptical line that a generation earlier would have seemed dangerously tainted with irreligion, but just how and why did the thinkers involved come to hold this position?Footnote ⁹¹ As with intellectual change in the period more generally, we here need to have recourse to careful study of individual thinkers and the way in which they used the intellectual resources at their disposal to respond to polarized imperatives by which they were presented – in this case ‘an Atheistical Sadducism on one hand, and a timorous Enthusiastical Credulity on the other’, in Hutchinson's words.Footnote ⁹² In each instance, we need to understand the ‘bundle’ of ideas which each individual formed, and hence to produce a subtle view of shifting patterns of ideas, freed from the party-political or other crude or idealized categories that have often dominated analysis in the past.Footnote ⁹³ In this case, it appears that the almost stereotypical fear of sadducism as a slippery slop towards irreligion was at last coming to seem less convincing, in conjunction with an increasing sense of the incompatibility of witchcraft and related beliefs with commonplace Augustan views of man's place in nature. Gradually, as more and more came to adopt such a position, the centre of gravity of educated opinion shifted, away from either the apologetic ethos of a Glanvill or the neutrality of an Addison towards a predominantly sceptical attitude, with magic being banished to the realm of make-believe. It was this situation that led to the repeal of the witchcraft act in 1736 – reflecting the actual cessation of prosecutions under it since the 1710s – while it was perhaps given its most classic expression by William Hogarth in his much-reproduced ‘Credulity, superstition, and fanaticism’ of 1762.Footnote ⁹⁴

Of course, Hogarth had polemical purposes in his print, not least in attacking the newly rampant Methodists, who he saw as dangerously prone to beliefs of the kind that he so effectively ridiculed. There is also the endurance of popular beliefs noted at the start of this article, together with a continuing undercurrent of supernaturalism among the educated.Footnote ⁹⁵ But it could be argued that the situation was now one which I have elsewhere invoked the concept of ‘schizophrenia’ to describe, in that those who continued to accept the reality of phenomena of this kind kept such matters to themselves.Footnote ⁹⁶ They thus followed the earlier example of Boyle, whose sensitivity to the fashionable attitudes of the London intelligentsia made him demur from publishing his collection of supernatural phenomena for fear of being labelled credulous. Jonathan Barry has similarly illustrated the dilemma of ‘public infidelity and private belief’ in the context of eighteenth-century Bristol – in other words, the extent to which people continued to harbour a private commitment to the reality of occult phenomena in spite of diffidence about admitting this in public for fear of ridicule.Footnote ⁹⁷ But the state of affairs that Barry surveys is revealing of where the preponderance of opinion by this time lay, in contrast to the situation half a century earlier, when Boyle was apparently rare in his squeamishness and when most were impelled by the link of sadducism with ‘atheism’ to adopt a more or less accepting view of the reality of witchcraft and related phenomena. At last, after the rather convoluted process outlined in this article, the concept of the ‘decline of magic’ had arguably become a meaningful one.