Madness and Criminal Culpability

The Tudor contribution to insanity law had been handed down from Elizabeth's father a half century earlier in 1541. That statute, 33 Henry VIII, c. 20, “How Treason committed by a Lunatick shall be punished, and in what Manner he shall be tried,” had been written to ensure that Henry could make examples of notorious traitors like the elderly Jane Boleyn, Lady Rochford, the lady of the bedchamber who served as pander for Henry's fifth queen, Catherine Howard, and one of her many suitors, Thomas Culpeper.Footnote 23 Lady Rochford was arrested on 9 February 1541/1542 for her treason and executed with Catherine four days later. It seems that under the duress of her treason trial Lady Rochford had gone insane, and Henry needed the legal means to execute her for her treason. As her precipitate execution suggests, English monarchs seldom concerned themselves with the niceties of what we consider today to be a complicated and often lengthy process, namely, the legal determination of mental illness and its mitigation of criminal culpability. Henry's haste was probably connected with the difficulty of making any determination at all in the case of a defendant's apparent madness, as his statute further explained: “whether their Madnes or Lunacy by them outwardly shewed were of Truth, or falsly contrived and counterfeited, it is a Thing almost impossible certainly to judge and try.”Footnote 24 The fact that Henry covered himself with the sanction of law indicates that he or his advisors considered it a politically unpopular action. It may also signal that it was innovative to execute those suffering from madness.

Like most Tudor statutes involving high treason, much of this rather lengthy one is devoted to jurisdictional and procedural concerns and the monarch's right to forfeitures awarded through acts of attainder. Those defendants who had confessed their treason before the king's Majesty's Council, as Lady Rochford had, while possessing “good, perfect and whole Memory,” but who had subsequently fallen into “Madness or Lunacy” under the duress of trial and imprisonment, were remanded to a session of oyer et terminer. There, specially appointed commissioners would handle indictments before a jury of twelve freeholders (or peers if the accused were of the rank of the nobility), with the notable variation from common law procedure that the accused were tried in absentia. When the insane defendants were found guilty as charged, “they shall have and suffer Execution (their Madness or Lunacy notwithstanding)”; due process of law would inexorably lead to their execution. Deciding whether Lady Rochford's “antic disposition” was “falsly contrived and counterfeited” could be a prolonged and complicated process, but English monarchs had long enjoyed the prerogative of indicting, trying, and executing traitors.

It would be quite some time before legal minds again considered insanity and criminal culpability. In his Third part of the Institutes (written in 1628 and published in 1644), Sir Edward Coke (1552–1634), who was named Elizabeth's attorney general two years after Hacket's execution, focused on the Tudor brutality toward those suffering from madness in the course of explicating Edward III's original treason statute. According to that statute, treason had occurred “quant home fait compasser ou ymaginer la mort nostre Seigniour le Roi” (“when a man doth compasse or imagine the death of our Lord the King”), even when, according to pre-Conquest law at least, the man was mad.Footnote 25 The great champion of common law reasonably pointed out that “he that is non compos mentis and totally deprived of all compassings, and imaginations, cannot commit high treason by compassing or imagining the death of the king.” In other words, madmen cannot commit treason, because they cannot intend to commit treason. Coke also described his horror at the Henrician precedent of executing madmen and women. Henry's “cruell and inhuman law lived not long, but was repealed, for in that point also it was against the common law, because by intendment of law the execution of the offender is for example, ut poena ad paucos metus ad omnes perveniat [that the punishment may reach a few, but the fear of it affect all] … but so it is not when a mad man is executed, but should be a miserable spectacle, both against law, and of extreame inhumanity and cruelty, and can be no example to others.”Footnote 26 Lest his contemporaries think he was soft on traitors, Coke quickly added, “but it must be an absolute madnesse, and a totall deprivation of memorie.” Coke's balking at the cruelty of the Henrician statute is not based solely on his relative enlightenment (although he was arguably ahead of many of his contemporaries in his legal recognition of the insane). He drives home the point that English common law intends the spectacle of punishment to have a deterrent effect on criminals, which the execution of those suffering from madness clearly does not. One wonders what the Cheapside crowd thought of Hacket's execution.

In his Conspiracie for Pretended Reformation, Richard Cosin refused to credit reports that the now executed Hacket had ever been mad even though he notes that authorities in Northamptonshire had imprisoned and flogged Hacket at least twice, assuming that his outrageous speeches against Elizabeth were simply “some spice of phrenesie” rather than stemming from “any setled and advised malice.”Footnote 27 Evidently some detractors, whom Cosin described as “peversely wedded to their owne wils, and addicted to their fansies once conceaved,” held that the three conspirators were “madde, and furious persons.” This position clearly damaged the reputations of the Newgate commissioners, who found Hacket guilty of intentional treason, while exonerating the Puritan leaders who were really behind the tumult.Footnote 28

In fact, as Thomas Phelippes's account of the episode suggests, everyone in England, except for Cosin and his superiors, seemed to have wondered about the conspirators’ collective sanity.Footnote 29 Because of these rumors of “madde” and “furious” conspirators, Cosin addresses those who would “justifie any traytors” in order to discount “whether they or any of them, in these practises, were in deed transported with furie, besides themselves, so as they needed not to have bene regarded, nor (by lawe) ought to have suffered death for them.”Footnote 30 He discusses at some length seven “wants of understanding and reason” that might argue for leniency in the case of Hacket and his disciples.Footnote 31 Closely following Cicero's Tusculan Disputations, Cosin's list provides a literarily inflected understanding of madness arranged by degree of severity: Furor, Dementia, Insania, Fatuitas, Stultitia, Lethargia, and Delirium, that is, violent madness, less violent madness, inconstancy of mind, idiocy, simplicity, radical forgetfulness, and dotage. He notes that many understandably confuse either Furor or Dementia with Insania, Fatuitas with Stultitia, and Lethargia with Delirium. Furor and Dementia seem to be different degrees of the same kind of madness; both consist of a “darkening”—if not a “full blindness”—of the “understanding of the mind,” although Cosin does not speculate about a similarity of causes.Footnote 32Dementia, however, is much less violent than Furor and “useth greater quietnes of body, & calmenes, and sheweth not such outward testimonies in … actions, of alienation of … wits.” Those suffering from either Furor or Dementia, however, do not “have any ruled memorie, will, understanding, or feeling, of that they doe or say.”Footnote 33 Yet those suffering from Insania, while not perfectly sound of mind, “can observe and doe the common offices of this life,” retaining, we can surmise, the abilities to remember, intend, and perceive. The Insaniae, whom Cosin tells his readers are commonly termed “franticke, braine-sicke, cracked-witted, cocke-braines, or hare-brained,” are legally culpable for their actions. They are able to perceive what they say and do and what others say to them, despite their “strange conceits, toying fansies,” and performance of “sundry, rash, undiscreete, mad, and foolish parts.”Footnote 34

Cosin asserted that Hacket suffered from Insania because—before his obvious dissimulation on the scaffold—he appeared to act like a sane person, being attentive to what was being said, being silent when he should, and answering interrogators at appropriate times (if not appropriately). To explain Hacket's blasphemy at his execution, Cosin provides two possibilities: his behavior there argued “either a villanous dissimulation to have his execution respited, or a desperate intemperancie against God, for frustrating him.”Footnote 35 In fact, in Cosin's estimation, not only did Hacket's cunning throughout the episode argue for his sanity, but “(albeit his speeches were most villanous agaynst the Queene, and blasphemous towards God) … he understood what was sayd and done, his wordes had sense, and his prayer was coherent togither, one part with another.”Footnote 36 In other words, the coherence of Hacket's scaffold blasphemy proved that he was simply guilty of “notable hypocrisie, craft, and dissembled holiness,” and not suffering from Furor or Dementia.Footnote 37

Toward the end of his description, Cosin explained why he must distinguish Furor and Dementia from Insania before discounting the possibility that the conspirators suffered from the first two maladies: “If a man, whiles he is troubled with either of the first two infirmities [Furor or Dementia], shall commit anything, which in his owne nature is criminall, all good lawes doe rather pitie his case, then punish him … for voluntas non actus, affectus non effectus distinguunt maleficia we are not in punishing offendors, so much to respect the event, and what is done, as with what purpose, mind, and affection the thing is done.”Footnote 38 Cosin reminded his readers at the end of his discussion that “such as be furious, and distracted of their wits, are intended (whiles that passion lasteth) to have no will, to know or perceave nothing, & therefore not to give consent to any thing they doe, or say.”Footnote 39 This suggests that an offender suffering from Furor or Dementia by definition lacks guilt for his actions and therefore cannot be held liable or punished for those actions at law, because he is deficient in will, knowledge, or perception. This was not the case for one suffering from Insania, however, who, because he can perceive and remember what he says and does and what others say to him, is legally culpable for his actions. Furor and Dementia, however, mitigated criminal culpability even in cases of treason, and Cosin would have none of it for Hacket and company. While Cosin grudgingly admitted that the conspirators’ actions “were fantasticall, unaduised, & most fond and unlikely,” he was unwilling to diagnose Furor or Dementia on their part. He argues instead that it could not “be affirmed, that any of them were mad, beside themselves, and out of their wits.” As evidence of this, Cosin reminded his readers that the threshold for legal culpability is defined as “not knowing and perceiving what they did or said, or what others said or did unto them,” while these three certainly did know and perceive their situations. Hacket, Coppinger, and Arthington may have exhibited symptoms of Insania but were certainly not suffering from Furor or Dementia and thus could face trial and execution, as Hacket already had.

Recovering from Demonic Possession

In his Conspiracie for Pretended Reformation, Richard Cosin explained that Arthington wrote a letter of submission to Hatton and Whitgift from the Wood Street Counter shortly after his arrest. Arthington next wrote to the Privy Council at large, describing, “the whole course (as he pretendeth) of this action so farre as he was made acquainted therewith, humbly craving their Lordships mediation unto the Queenes most excellent Maiestie for his pardon, and acknowledging his dangerous error, and divelish seduction (by Hacket especially) into this traitorous action.”Footnote 40 This plea is probably what is referred to in a Privy Council entry dated 2 August 1591, less than a week after Hacket's execution. Upon receiving it, the council directed John Fortescue (with the assistance of rackmaster Richard Young) to clarify “divers pointes doubtfull” in Arthington's “declaracion lately sett down.” Arthington's “due examinacion” was to be obtained “by waie of interrogatories” and his “direct aunswere” returned to the Privy Council.Footnote 41 Arthington seems to have convinced Fortescue and the Privy Council of his sincerity; on Accession Day, 17 November 1591, his wife and brother were given access to him. On 9 February 1592, Ash Wednesday, Arthington was granted liberty within the prison and his officially endorsed apology, The Seduction of Arthington, was printed soon after.Footnote 42

In his extended and published plea for mercy, however, the former prophet of judgment never suggested that he or his cohorts suffered from madness of any degree. In its preface, Arthington assures his “well disposed Reader” that his text was “perused and allowed by authoritie” before it was sent back to him for his approval. We can assume that the publication of this self-defense signals the culmination of a long process of negotiation with those municipal, secular, and religious authorities embarrassed by the Cheapside event and still stinging from Hacket's blasphemous scaffold display. An acceptable apology would have to support the political priorities of the privy councilors, explain the confused response of the London officers in not stopping the incident, and enable the Bishops to continue exerting pressure on the imprisoned Puritan leaders. It would simultaneously have to explain in culturally recognizable terms who or what was to blame for the event while suggesting that another such episode was unlikely.

The Seduction of Arthington presents an astonishing defense for his traitorous blasphemy: Arthington claims that William Hacket, Satan's minion, had seduced and demonically possessed him during the days leading up to the Cheapside proclamation. In his description, Arthington is careful to remember the moment that Hacket corrupted him. Following their private prayers on the Sunday before the episode, Arthington prayed for Her Majesty's safety in light of the many traitors they believed were surrounding her at court. Coppinger and Hacket prayed next, and then Hacket “imbraced me in his armes, protesting that he tendered the safetie of her Maiestie euerye waie … at the which instant I thinke I was filled with Satans spirit, for before we departed, I felt my selfe verie hot within, which I verelie then thought had beene an extraordinarie motion of the holie-ghost … which the Lord had sent downe as a blessing of his loue vpon our exercise, so I departed a very glad man.”Footnote 43 In a curious melding of Galenic humoral theory, demonic possession, and ecstatic religious belief, Arthington underscores why Archbishop Whitgift and his supporters feared Puritan “exercises” and “prophesyings” so intensely.

Arthington then argued that the satanic Hacket had temporarily possessed him prior to and during the tumult. When Hacket was executed, Arthington claimed the possession was lifted, much as we might expect from analogous cases of witchcraft and bewitchment. When his fellow prisoners in the Wood Street Counter told him about Hacket's “desperate end,” “Then said I he was no man sure, but a Deuill incarnate, appearing to me as an angel of light. And suddenlie I felt my selfe quite dispossest of that hot spirit: and of all those grosse and palpable errors which I held so confidently in his life time, thinking indeed I had not offended.”Footnote 44 The death of Satan's agent relieved the demoniac from his or her possessed state. But Arthington's dispossession was not instantaneous with Hacket's execution; it is his utterance to his fellow prisoners that signals his release from Hacket's influence. For purposes of the apology, the dispossession had to be a public moment verifiable by witnesses.

As we might expect from an Elizabethan churchman, Richard Cosin mentions demonic possession in the Hacket case only when discounting it. He repeatedly denies the possibility of any explanation of the conspirators’ actions except outright treason against Elizabeth through the denigration of the queen's religious settlement and church hierarchy. When we consider the antiprelatical publicity that exorcisms garnered for both Catholics and Puritans in the last two decades of Elizabeth's reign, it is not surprising that ecclesiastical spokesmen were skeptical about demoniacs. In fact, most of our extant accounts of demonic possession are recorded in anti-Catholic or anti-Puritan polemics challenging the efficacy of exorcism.Footnote 45 Those aligned with Whitgift regularly tried to discourage both Catholic and Puritan exorcists in polemic and at law, but numerous pamphlets attest to the popularity of the practice throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.Footnote 46

Different factions found it expedient to claim to be able to distinguish demonic possession from bizarre or blasphemous behavior on legal or theological grounds. In the legal courts, proponents of common law wrested the trials of certain forms of antiprelaticalism to secular courts. This expanded the scope of treason while diminishing the authority of ecclesiastical courts and the bishops. In terms of the practices of rival theologies, the controversial Catholic exorcisms at Denham of 1585–86 and Puritan John Darrell's attempted dispossession of Katherine Wright of Derbyshire in 1586 enabled both Catholics and Puritans to demonstrate the efficacy of their belief systems. In response to such popular spectacles, the Elizabethan church moved away from the dangerous unpredictability of exorcisms. Exorcisms were then further discredited when Samuel Harsnett “discovered” their theatricality in his exposé of Darrell's attempt to cure the fraudulent demoniac Thomas Darling.Footnote 47

While in The Seduction, Arthington claimed he could distinguish his current state of physical, mental, and spiritual soundness from his earlier state of being a demoniac, his contemporaries might not have been so certain. Alongside the Ciceronian categories of mental illness laid out by Cosin were those devised by practicing Tudor physicians. Six years after the Henrician insanity statute went into effect, the itinerant physician Andrew Boorde attempted to distinguish the different kinds of madness gleaned from his many extended travels on the Continent. In an addendum to his Breviary of Helthe called The Extravagantes, he described a sufferer of demonic possession—the “Demoniacus”—as having “another kinde of madnesse” and discusses it in conjunction with “Mania, Melancholia, Frenisis, … [and the] Lunaticus.” Boorde tells his reader that those afflicted with mania, “be full of divinacion, as thynkynge them selfe to conjure, or to create, or to make thinges that no man can do but God, and doth presume upon supernaturall thinges, thynkynge that they can thinke or do the thinge the which is impossible for man to do.” Likewise, some melancholics “are full of fantasies … so fantasticall that they wyll thynke them selfe good or as god.”Footnote 48 The frenzied rave when beset with fevers, and lunatics are “fantasticall” once a month. All these sufferers should be pitied, save one. Boorde's vituperation is reserved for the “Demoniacus," who “will do much harme & evyll, worser than they which be maniake,” because “theyr propertie is to hurt and kyll them selfe, or els to hurt and kyll any other thynge.”Footnote 49

Clearly, demonic possession was extremely problematic to diagnose because it shared symptoms with other varieties of mental instability.Footnote 50 According to the official liturgy of the Catholic Church, exorcists had to be careful to distinguish demoniacs from those suffering from melancholia or other mental illnesses.Footnote 51 D. P. Walker, in a study of witchcraft and demonic possession in early modern France and England, notes that it was commonly believed that the devil targeted for possession those already suffering from diseases such as hysteria, melancholy, and epilepsy. This conflation of a physical or mental illness with a spiritual one had a long tradition; the Belgian lecturer and Jesuit Cornelius Steen (à Lapide; 1566–1637), when “commenting on the lunatics cured by Christ in Matthew 4 and 17, is able to cite Origen, Chrysostom and Jerome, in support of his view that the devil habitually uses the morbid effects of the moon on the humours, especially black bile, in order to torment demoniacs.”Footnote 52

When this mysterious substance, black bile, was too abundant in an early modern body, it was believed to cause a humoral imbalance resulting in a species of Elizabethan mental illness. Timothy Bright discussed this bilious malady at length in A Treatise of Melancholy. A central theme of the Treatise is to distinguish humoral melancholy from feelings of guilt in the afflicted conscience. At the transition between the two discussions, Bright reiterated the traditional possibility that Satan uses humoral melancholy to promote feelings of guilt in the victim's conscience that would lead to spiritual despair. He mentioned “that affection which riseth upon horror, and conscience of sinne, with feare & feeling of Gods revenging hand against the same; whether melancholick persons are subject most therunto; what advantage Satan taketh in this case by the frailtie of the bodie.”Footnote 53 While Bright did not explore this further, his differentiation between melancholy and the guilty conscience is fraught with the same kinds of diagnostic problems noted by Steen and others in their distinguishing demoniacs from madmen.Footnote 54 A man as learned as Sir Thomas Browne would say, in Religio Medici: “I hold that the devil doth really possess some men, the spirit of melancholy others, the spirit of delusion others.”Footnote 55

From the patristic writers through the seventeenth century, then, demonic possession was traditionally associated with the humoral illness known as “melancholia.” This disease, in turn, was often accompanied by an afflicted conscience, or confused with it, due to its almost identical symptomatology. After the Jesuits’ infiltration during the English Mission in the late 1570s and 1580s and the Puritans’ increasingly strident calls for further reformation, however, the conscience was legally culpable for its treasonous intentions, guilty associations, and misplaced allegiances. While severe melancholia and demonic possession could protect their sufferers from trial and punishment, authorities considered the conscientious actions derived from one's religious beliefs punishable at common law; if these heterodox beliefs were justified by the subject's conscience, the conscience itself was defective, and punishable.

Arthington the demoniac was quick to distance his particular recovery from those of the over two hundred exorcisms reported between 1563 and 1603.Footnote 56 In a nod to the bishops and their disapproval of demonic possession and public exorcism, Arthington stressed how he was restored to his “former soundnesse in the knowledge of the truth, without the help of any man mortall”; he claimed that God derived more glory from this fact than from contemporary accounts of exorcism at the hands of Catholic priests or through Puritan prayers and fasting.Footnote 57 Not only did Arthington distinguish his case from most contemporary demonic dispossessions, but throughout his apology Arthington also signaled that he did not consider his cure a matter for “physike,” or medical knowledge.Footnote 58 As Arthington repeatedly attested “in his conscience,” his was a spiritual disease, curable only by the grace of God.

Furthermore, Arthington considered it the greatest mark of the Lord's compassion toward him that He “not once suffer Satan to assault my conscience, with the fearefull sight of death and desperation, nor once to make doubt of my salvation, during all the time that I was possest with Hackets devilish spirite, and quite devoid of grace to acknowledge my sinnes.”Footnote 59 Arthington claimed that his salvation remained intact even though his grace was suspended during his possession. Thus, while admitting the possibility that Satan did attempt to cause him spiritual despair, his conscience, along with his assurance of ultimate salvation as one of the elect, remained intact postpossession, and after his trauma Arthington was able to acknowledge and confess his sins to God, Elizabeth, her bishops, and the Privy Council retrospectively. Both secular and ecclesiastical authorities could benefit from Arthington's case, moreover, even if they disagreed as to the specific cause underlying Arthington's behavior, because each one had a plausible reason explaining Arthington's aberrant behavior to those who held them as authorities.

Arthington's defense strategy of playing competing authorities against each other tells us much about the relationship between demonic possession, madness, and religiously inflected treason in late Elizabethan England. It seems that the queen and her privy councilors were more than ready to believe what we find incredible today, namely, that demonic possession could occur and that they had executed one of Satan's chief minions on 28 July 1591. Their acceptance of Arthington's retrospective claim also let them argue that he was not mad at the time of the uprising but simply possessed, an important justification for their execution of Hacket, whose sanity was doubted by many but whose demonic malevolence was not. Rather than focusing on how readily Arthington's contemporaries would have accepted the purported causes of demonic possession—Satan, witches, and their familiars—or how they would have thought about the complex political repercussions of madness when it challenged the highest levels of authority, we can weigh the legal license allowed demoniacs and madmen against the cultural anxiety expressed over their treasonous behavior and public blasphemy by Elizabethan authorities, both secular and religious.Footnote 60

Memory, Volition, and Intention

In addition to volitional and cognitive excuses, insanity defenses today are often connected to the defendant's inability to remember his or her actions. Henry's statute had distinguished between victims of “Madness or Lunacy” and those who had “good, perfect and whole Memory,” if only to justify his execution of his fifth queen's pander. Elizabethans also forgave the insane for their faulty memories, but, in a Christian world that regularly equated personal and legal guilt, intention became paramount. Intentions are recalled through memory, and for Elizabethans the offender's measure of guilt, and thus punishment, was derived from those intentions. The challenge faced by the Privy Council after the Hacket affair was to present Arthington as intentional after the fact in recanting but not intentional earlier when he committed his treasonous acts, which he remembered distinctly. At the end of the sixteenth century, only one category encompassed these seemingly conflicting claims: demoniac.

Convincingly for his self-presentation, Arthington remembered everything, from the dates of Puritan prayer meetings to minute details of correspondences. As we have seen, Arthington claimed to remember the precise instant he was possessed and exactly when he was released from his possession. But from what precisely had he dispossessed himself? Not only from Hacket's satanic influence, he told his readers, but also from his own “grosse and palpable errors” that he now realizes are indeed offensive.Footnote 61 But at that time he was cognitively unaware that his actions were wrong until he received knowledge that the volitional agent behind them, Hacket, was destroyed. Thus Arthington could hold Satan ultimately responsible for the blasphemous and treasonous statements that he uttered when under his control: “It was not I then, that pronounced Hacket to be Christ Jesus the judge of the world, but the spirit of Satan, (which that wicked wretch had infused into me, as you have heard before) for touching the inwarde man, the Lord and my conscience will still beare mee recorde, that I had no minde to dishonor Christ Jesus or to hurt anie creature.”Footnote 62 Arthington's claims problematized a clear distinction between madness and demonic possession, because, while he assigned the intentions of his treasonous actions to the satanic Hacket, his memory was intact. This provided that he could present himself as either a demoniac or as one suffering from Insania as described by Cosin, because both demoniacs and the Insaniae retained the use of their memory. The Insaniae, however, could be and were punished for their crimes. Therefore, only as a former demoniac could Arthington retroactively feel remorse in his conscience for actions that had not troubled him at the time of their performance and not be punished for those actions. His conscience would indicate that his past actions were wrong, albeit involuntary. His conscience, in other words, could accuse his past bad acts, as a conscience should, because he was a demoniac at the time of their commission.

Arthington's apology also had to correspond with contemporary understanding of a demoniac's legal culpability, of course. Legal cases involving demoniacs, like those of witchcraft, usually involved either the heresy of devil worship or the damage—the maleficium—that the demonically possessed had done. Arthington admits throughout the apology that he had sinned grievously, even locating the gravity of his sin somewhere on a peccatuum between Peter's denial and Judas's betrayal of Christ. He sharpens this categorization by carefully distinguishing his sin from Hacket’s, “thus much I protest upon my very conscience, that as before I have noted the sinne of Hacket to be the greatest that ever was committed by any reprobate: So I take mine to be absolutely the greatest that ever was done by any of the elect; And as I note Hackets rebellion, to be a sinne in the highest degree I feare against the holy-ghost: So doe I estimate my sinne in proclaiming hym, to be in the highest degree against the lord Jesus, as hee was man.”Footnote 63 Notwithstanding his innovative categories of sin (and his curious pride at the “greatest” sin ever committed by one of the elect), Arthington pointedly couches his culpability in spiritual terms: he had sinned against Jesus rather than committed treason against Elizabeth. His was a sin of ignorance, and nonculpable ignorance at that. Furthermore, his distinction between Hacket's sins against the holy ghost and sins like his against Jesus is telling; he had set up this distinction earlier is his apology by defining a sin against the holy ghost while combining passages from Peter and Paul: “A wilfull sinning against the knowne truth, and a mans owne conscience, making a mocke thereof, Which may be the more aggravated, By spitefull reproching the said knowne truth, in contempt of Christ Jesus the Author thereof.”Footnote 64 Arthington's sin against Jesus, however, a forgivable sin of nonculpable ignorance, is comparable to that of an apostle: “when I was busiest in serving of Satan, I did thinke then most of all to please the lord Jesus. … Oh how truelie then may I saie with S. Paule, Though with my members I served Satan, yet in my minde I served Christ Jesus, having my whole intention to please him.”Footnote 65 By thus sinning against Jesus while attempting to serve him, Arthington argues that his sin did not charge his conscience with a willful crime against Elizabeth's authority. According to this argument, his is not a crime falling under the jurisdiction of those who had tried, tortured, and executed the Jesuit Edmund Campion and his Catholic companions for their sins of conscience, tried and indefinitely incarcerated the Puritan John Udall for his attempt to abrogate the authority of Elizabethan Bishops, or tortured, tried, and executed William Hacket for his treasonous intention to depose Elizabeth. Arthington had brilliantly used the Elizabethan discourse of a politically culpable conscience to “justify” himself through his lack of guilty intentions.

Mitigating Circumstances

A little over a year after the Hacket incident, on 7 August 1592, the Privy Council ordered that Archbishop Whitgift release Arthington on bail.Footnote 66 The fact that Arthington was in Whitgift's control a year after the incident is telling for our estimation of the relative authority of those who policed the boundary of criminal intention in Elizabethan England. Whitgift could have treated Arthington much as he did the separatists John Greenwood and Henry Barrow. In July 1592, one month before the warrant for Arthington's release, Greenwood was released from Fleet Prison where he had been incarcerated since his indictment as a recusant at the Newgate sessions of May 1588. Greenwood was rearrested in December of 1592, he and Barrow were tried for seditious writings beginning 21 March 1593, convicted and sentenced to death two days later, and executed early in the morning on 6 April 1593 (after two last-minute reprieves at the Tyburn scaffold). When Whitgift needed leverage against the Puritans, he used separatists as an object lesson, and Arthington's case could have been recast to this end.

Also important is where Arthington was held—the Wood Street Counter. Four days after their arrests, both Hacket and Coppinger had been transferred to Bridewell Prison to be examined under the care of rackmaster Richard Young. According to historian John Langbein, warrants from the Privy Council that specified torture began to direct prisoners to Bridewell instead of the Tower from 1589 to 1601, so the transfer of Hacket and Coppinger is a telling one.Footnote 67 However, there is no indication that Arthington was ever held anywhere other than the Wood Street Counter, one of two jails under the jurisdiction of the London sheriffs intended particularly for disturbers of the peace.Footnote 68 Also curious is the omission of Arthington from the warrants that order the delivery of Hacket and Coppinger to Richard Young in Bridewell.Footnote 69 Even though Richard Young was ordered to be present at Fortescue's 2 August 1591 interrogation of Arthington, torture was not authorized. Arthington was being protected, but by whom and to what end?

One possibility is that he was already known to the Privy Council. Henry Arthington was a native of Wakefield, in the West Riding of Yorkshire.Footnote 70 There is a mention of a Henry “Ardington” in a document from 1582 concerning a Catholic in Hellifield Pele, west and north of Wakefield in Yorkshire. That Ardington is described as “a most faithful Protestant” who would testify against the traitor.Footnote 71 Supporting the possibility that Ardington as witness for the prosecution is the same as Arthington the prophet of judgment, Arthington touched upon his anti-Catholic service to the Council of the North when he asked the Privy Council to treat him leniently.Footnote 72 This timing would correspond with the efforts of Henry Hastings, the third Earl of Huntington, appointed lord president of the Council of the North on 21 November 1582, to expel Catholicism and encourage a vigorous preaching Protestantism in the north of England. The service Arthington provided to Huntington and the Council of the North detecting and testifying against Catholics may have been enough to delay the torture applied to Hacket and Coppinger and the painful execution suffered by Hacket, while giving Arthington time to frame an apology to Hatton, Whitgift, and the Privy Council.Footnote 73

Although they could not touch Arthington, the bishops, of course, did not hesitate to use the Hacket incident for their own ends. In 1593, Richard Bancroft, then bishop of London, moved several steps beyond Cosin's denunciation in his Daungerous Positions and Proceedings.Footnote 74 He wrote this historical account against the “Presbiteriall Discipline” laboring under the “pretence of reformation” to alter England's ecclesiastical settlement. The most recent events in that sordid history, of course, involved the Hacket conspiracy, which was extensively cited from primary correspondence and reports drawn from the conspirators’ interrogations. Although little evidence supports him, Bancroft repeatedly claims that Puritan leaders had encouraged Hacket's conspiracy. If prominent Puritan leaders such as Giles Wigginton, Thomas Cartwright, and Peter Wentworth had discouraged the disciples when they answered their letters, Bancroft tells his readers, the disciples would not have followed Hacket. Thus Bancroft considers the Puritan leadership in London “favourers” and “concealers” of treason “who are all of them within the daunger & compasse of law.”Footnote 75 In fact, the Puritans’ refusal to participate in a conference requested by Coppinger signifies that they knew just how dangerous knowledge of his intended course would be.

Conclusion

While Arthington's attempt to push the debate into the realm of conscience might be considered shrewd, his calling for Elizabeth's deposition in Cheapside immediately ended any possibility of ecclesiastical trial. It also indicates the relative authority of bishops and privy councilors in the early 1590s. Although the latter could have convicted and executed him at any time as an abettor of the already executed traitor Hacket, Elizabeth's privy councilors must have calculated that his published apology—explaining his former possession at the hands of Hacket—would produce better results for them than a possible repeat of Hacket's scaffoldside blasphemy. Publicizing Hacket's brutal execution after his “villanous dissimulation” had been calculated by both ecclesiastical and secular authorities to further their competing interests: a disturber of the peace of London had been spectacularly executed before the largest crowd in memory—his eviscerated “traytors heart” somehow testifying to his guilt—and his fanatical cause linked by the bishops to a group of imprisoned Puritan ministers awaiting trial. That Arthington was eventually released from Whitgift's imprisonment suggests that conscientious claims supporting the actions of the Privy Council (namely, executing the traitorous but completely sane Hacket) could trump the immediate goals of the bishops in further castigating the Puritans.

This article has focused on the intersection of the competing explanations describing two culturally recognized types of diminished responsibility—madness and demonic possession—and the arenas where such claims were evaluated in Elizabethan England. Today we invariably lump these two categories together, assigning their determination to psychiatrists, but the fields were not discrete in the early modern period until a politicized reason required a distinction.Footnote 76 Centuries before psychiatric experts could be called to testify to the defendant's “state of mind,” bishops, privy councilors, humoral physicians, and Puritan and Catholic exorcists all had a stake in making such determinations. If the categories of insanity and exorcism had political valences like other discourses in Elizabethan England, the authority to classify certain behavior as mad or satanically instigated was even more charged.

Arthington's complicated situation was that of a demoniac who challenged the queen's authority by slandering her lord chancellor and archbishop during a crowded market day in Cheapside. In the Manichean world of Elizabethan polemic, only one cause of Arthington's “effect defective” could be accepted—demonic possession. From our historical vantage, we cannot hope to diagnose Arthington's specific psychopathological illness or explain his sudden cure. But we can use events like the Hacket conspiracy and its cultural resonances to delve deeper into the competing discourses of demonic possession and mental illness in late Elizabethan England and, simultaneously, into the competition between rival authorities over a subject's conscience in the years just before William Perkins began writing his voluminous explanations of the conscience's role in discerning right from wrong.Footnote 77 At the time of the Cheapside incident, Arthington had been mad, demonically possessed, or deeply in collusion with religious radicals intent on destroying Elizabeth's church. Likely protected by Puritan sympathizers on the Privy Council, Arthington could not be lumped in with Cartwright and company (who were still awaiting their fates). Denying the possibility of Arthington's madness forced Whitgift and company to accept the Privy Council's claim: Arthington had acted disobediently—and perhaps even traitorously—but as a demoniac. For their part, the Privy Council accepted Arthington's explanation of demonic possession as a legitimate (and, for them, legitimizing) version of the events that laid the crime at an already executed commoner's door. Arthington's apology retroactively justified Hacket's brutal execution. This, then, is what was at stake: whether Arthington would be found to be mad or possessed would never have been at issue until his behavior pitted one claim to authority against another. That Arthington could remember his actions, intentions, and assurance of God's grace argued that he was not mad during the Hacket affair but rather had obeyed the dictates of conscience while demonically possessed. After the Jesuit infiltration in the preceding decade and the more recent threat of the Puritans from whom Arthington struggled to disassociate himself, his life would be spared only for two of these explanations, because an Elizabethan subject could recover from demonic possession, and possibly from madness, but not from a disobedient conscience.