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DEMONOLOGY AND WITCH-
HUNTING IN EARLY MODERN
EUROPE

Demonology – the intellectual study of demons and their powers –

contributed to the prosecution of thousands of witches. But how
exactly did intellectual ideas relate to prosecutions? Recent
scholarship has shown that some of the demonologists’ concerns
remained at an abstract intellectual level, while some of the judges’
concerns reflected popular culture. This book brings demonology
and witch-hunting back together, while placing both topics in their
specific regional cultures.
The book’s chapters, each written by a leading scholar, cover most
regions of Europe, from Scandinavia and Britain through to Germany,
France and Switzerland, and Italy and Spain. By focusing on various
intellectual levels of demonology, from sophisticated demonological
thought to the development of specific demonological ideas and
ideas within the witch trial environment, the book offers a thorough
examination of the relationship between demonology and witch-
hunting.
Demonology and Witch-Hunting in Early Modern Europe is
essential reading for all students and researchers of the history of
demonology, witch-hunting and early modern Europe.

Julian Goodare is Professor of History, University of Edinburgh. His

most recent book is The European Witch-Hunt (London: Routledge,
2016). His edited books include Scottish Witches and Witch-Hunters
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), and he is Director of the
online Survey of Scottish Witchcraft.
Rita Voltmer is Senior Lecturer in Medieval and Early Modern
History, University of Trier. Her most recent edited book is Herren
und Hexen in der Nordeifel (Weilerswist, 2018). Her current projects
are on the circulation of knowledge, processes of resilience, and
criminal justice in medieval and early modern Europe.

Liv Helene Willumsen is Professor Emerita of History, University of

Tromsø (UiT The Arctic University of Norway). Her books include
Witches of the North: Scotland and Finnmark (Leiden, 2013). In
2019 she was awarded the Norwegian King’s Medal of Merit. She is
currently researching transference of demonological ideas across
Europe.
Routledge Studies in the History of Witchcraft,
Demonology and Magic

The Science of Demons

Early Modern Authors Facing Witchcraft and the Devil
Edited by Jan Machielsen

Demonology and Witch-Hunting in Early Modern Europe

Edited by Julian Goodare, Rita Voltmer, and Liv Helene Willumsen

For more information about this series, please visit:

www.routledge.com/Routledge-Studies-in-the-History-of-Witchcraft-
Demonology-and-Magic/book-series/RSHWDM
DEMONOLOGY AND WITCH-
HUNTING IN EARLY MODERN
EUROPE

Edited by Julian Goodare, Rita Voltmer, and Liv

Helene Willumsen
First published 2021
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2021 selection and editorial matter, Julian Goodare, Rita Voltmer, and Liv Helene
Willumsen; individual chapters, the contributors

The right of Julian Goodare, Rita Voltmer, and Liv Helene Willumsen to be
identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their
individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered

trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to
infringe.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record has been requested for this book

ISBN: 978-0-367-44045-9 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-367-44052-7 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-00729-6 (ebk)
To the memory of Jens Chr. V. Johansen (1939–2017)
CONTENTS

Illustrations
Preface
Contributors

Introduction: Demonology and witch-trials in dialogue

Rita Voltmer and Liv Helene Willumsen

1 Demonology and the Relevance of the Witches’ Confessions

Rita Voltmer

2 The Metamorphoses of the Anti-Witchcraft Treatise Errores

Gazariorum (15th Century)
Georg Modestin

3 “I Confess That I Have Been Ignorant:” How the Malleus

Maleficarum changed the universe of a cleric at the end of the
fifteenth century
Walter Rummel

4 “In the Body:” The Canon Episcopi, Andrea Alciati, and

Gianfrancesco Pico’s humanized demons
Walter Stephens

5 French Demonology in an English Village: The St Osyth

experiment of 1582
Marion Gibson

6 English Witchcraft Pamphlets and the Popular Demonic

 James Sharpe

7 Witches’ Flight in Scottish Demonology

Julian Goodare

8 Demonology and Scepticism in Early Modern France: Bodin and

Montaigne
Felicity Green

9 Judge and Demonologist: Revisiting the impact of Nicolas Rémy

on the Lorraine witch trials
Rita Voltmer and Maryse Simon

10 Demonological Texts, Judicial Procedure, and the Spread of

Ideas About Witchcraft in Early Modern Rothenburg ob der
Tauber
Alison Rowlands

11 To Beat a Glass Drum: The transmission of popular notions of

demonology in Denmark and Germany
Jens Chr. V. Johansen

12 “He Promised Her So Many Things:” Witches, sabbats, and

devils in early modern Denmark
Louise Nyholm Kallestrup

13 Board Games, Dancing, and Lost Shoes: Ideas about witches’

gatherings in the Finnmark witchcraft trials
Liv Helene Willumsen

14 What Did a Witch-Hunter in Finland Know About Demonology?

Raisa Maria Toivo

15 The Guardian of Hell: Popular demonology, exorcism, and

mysticism in Baroque Spain
 María Tausiet

16 Interpreting Children’s Blåkulla Stories in Sweden (1675)

Jari Eilola

17 Connecting Demonology and Witch-Hunting in Early Modern

Europe
Julian Goodare

Index
ILLUSTRATIONS

Maps
1 Europe
2 Switzerland and Rhineland
3 Lorraine
4 Denmark and north Germany

Figures
1.1 Portrait of Johann Weyer (1577)
1.2 Title page of Niels Hemmingsen, Admonitio de Superstitionibus
Magicis Vitandis (1575)
1.3 Title page of Pierre de Lancre, Tableau de l’Inconstance des
Mauvais Anges et Démons (1613)
1.4 Title page of Henri Boguet, Discours des Sorciers (1602)
1.5 Title page of Peter Binsfeld, Tractatus de Confessionibus
Maleficorum et Sagarum (1591)
1.6 Title page of Peter Binsfeld, Tractat von Bekanntnuß der
Zauberer und Hexen (1591)
1.7 Title page of Martin Delrio, Disquisitionum Magicarum Libri Sex
(1599–1600)
1.8 Portrait of Richard Bernard (c. 1641)
1.9 Portrait of Benedict Carpzov the Younger (c. 1670/1671)
2.1 First page from Kemnat’s version of the Errores Gazariorum
(ante c. 1476)
3.1 Detail from the Miracle Book of Eberhardsklausen (1490–1536)
3.2 Detail from the Miracle Book of Eberhardsklausen (1490–1536)
3.3 Detail from the Miracle Book of Eberhardsklausen (1490–1536)
4.1 Portrait of Andrea Alciati (c. 1617)
4.2 Coin with the portrait of Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola (c.
1515)
4.3 Title page of Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola, Strix (1523)
5.1 Title page of A true and just Recorde (1582)
5.2 Title page of Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft
(1584)
6.1 Title page of The Examination and Confession of certaine
Wytches (1566)
6.2 Title page of A full and Impartial Account of the Discovery of
Sorcery (1712)
7.1 Title page of King James VI, Daemonologie (1597)
7.2 Portrait of Andrew Melville (post c. 1642)
7.3 Portrait of George Mackenzie (ante c. 1691)
8.1 Title page of Michel de Montaigne, Essais (1588)
8.2 Title page of Jean Bodin, De la Démonomanie des Sorciers
(1580)
8.3 Portrait of Jean Bodin (ante c. 1620)
9.1 Title page of Nicolas Rémy, Dæmonolatriæ Libri Tres (1595)
9.2 Title page of Nicolas Rémy, Dæmonolatria, Das ist/Von
Unholden und Zauber Geistern (1598)
9.3 Illustration from Nicolas Rémy, Dæmonolatria, Oder
Beschreibung von Zaubern und Zauberinnen (1693)
10.1 Portrait of Johann Georg Goedelmann (ante c. 1629)
10.2 Title page of Johann Ludwig Hartmann, Neue Teuffels-
Stücklein (1678)
10.3 Portrait of Sebastian Kirchmeier (ante c. 1689)
11.1 View of Barntrup (c. 1630)
11.2 View of Rugård (19th century)
12.1 Portrait of Niels Hemmingsen (c. 1688)
12.2 Title page of Niels Hemmingsen, En Undervisning aff den
Hellige Scrifft (1618)
13.1 First page of the court records of the trial of Kirsten
Sørensdatter (1621)
13.2 Detail from a map of Vardø, Norway (1601)
14.1 Timeline of Nils Psilander’s diary records
14.2 Title page of Michael Freude, Gewissens-Fragen von Processen
wieder die Hexen (1667)
15.1 Title page of Luis Vélez de Guevara, El Diablo Cojuelo (1641)
15.2 Title page and frontispiece of Alain-René Lesage, Le Diable
Boiteux, or the Devil upon Two Sticks (1708)
16.1 Engraving of the witch-trials in Mora, Sweden (1670)
17.1 Portrait of Antoine Augustin Calmet (c. 1716)
17.2 Detail from Salvator Rosa, “Witches at their Incantations” (c.
1646)
17.3 The so-called “Trierer Hexentanzplatz” (1593)
17.4 Portrait of Joseph Glanvill (c. 1681)
PREFACE

We are grateful to the Department of History, University of Tromsø,

for hosting a conference in 2014, “Demons and Witches: The Impact
of Demonology on European Witch Hunts,” organized by Rita
Voltmer and Liv Helene Willumsen. Early versions of twelve of the
chapters printed below were presented at this conference. Jari Eilola,
Peter Elmer, Marion Gibson, Julian Goodare, Louise Nyholm
Kallestrup, Georg Modestin, Alison Rowlands, Walter Rummel, James
Sharpe, Maryse Simon, Raisa Maria Toivo, Rita Voltmer, and Liv
Helene Willumsen spoke at the conference, while Wolfgang
Behringer and Stuart Clark acted as chairs and discussants. The
editors subsequently invited Felicity Green, Walter Stephens, and
María Tausiet to broaden the perspective of the present book with
their chapters.
Chapter 15 below, by María Tausiet, was kindly translated from
Spanish by Ismael del Olmo (whose own scholarly work is cited in
the footnotes of the chapter). We are grateful to Dr del Olmo for his
careful work, and to the School of History, Classics and Archaeology,
University of Edinburgh, for providing necessary funds.
The saddest event to occur during the preparation of this volume
was the death in 2017 of one of its contributors, Jens Chr. V.
Johansen. Professor Johansen was one of the foremost historians of
Danish witchcraft. He had hoped to speak at the Tromsø conference
but was too ill to do so. He did, however, complete his chapter for
the volume, and we are delighted that his widow, Grethe Jacobsen,
has agreed to its publication. The volume is dedicated to his
memory.
The editorial staff at Routledge have maintained a consistent
interest in the project and have helped to guide us in preparation of
the volume.
MAP 1 Europe
CONTRIBUTORS

Jari Eilola is Academy Research Fellow in History and Ethnology,

University of Jyväskylä. His publications include Rajapinnoilla:
Sallitun ja kielletyn määritteleminen 1600-luvun jälkipuoliskon
noituus- ja taikuustapauksissa (Helsinki, 2003). His research
interests include witchcraft in Finnish and Swedish towns.

Marion Gibson is Professor of Renaissance and Magical Literatures,

University of Exeter. Her most recent books are Rediscovering
Renaissance Witchcraft (London, 2017) and Witchcraft: The Basics
(London, 2018). Her other books include Reading Witchcraft
(London, 1999), Witchcraft Myths in American Culture (London,
2007) and Imagining the Pagan Past (London, 2013).

Julian Goodare is Professor of History, University of Edinburgh. His

most recent book is The European Witch-Hunt (London, 2016). His
edited books include Scottish Witches and Witch-Hunters
(Basingstoke, 2013), and he is Director of the online Survey of
Scottish Witchcraft.

Felicity Greenis Senior Lecturer in History, University of Edinburgh.

She is author of Montaigne and the Life of Freedom (Cambridge,
2012). She is currently working on representations of the household
in early modern Europe.

Jens Chr. V. Johansen was external lector and Associate Professor at

the SAXO-institute, University of Copenhagen, until his death in
2017. His publications include Da djævelen var ude: Trolddom i det
17. arhundredes Danmark (Odense, 1991), and recently “Material
and Popular Culture,” in E. I. Kouri and Jens E. Olesen (eds.), The
Cambridge History of Scandinavia, vol. ii: 1520–1870 (Cambridge,
2016).

Louise Nyholm Kallestrup is Associate Professor in History, University

of Southern Denmark. She is author of Agents of Witchcraft in Early
Modern Italy and Denmark (Basingstoke, 2015). She is co-editor
(with Raisa Maria Toivo) of Contesting Orthodoxy: Heresy, Magic and
Witchcraft in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Basingstoke,
2017).

Georg Modestin is a research associate at the University of Fribourg,

and teaches history at the Kantonsschule (Gymnasium) Freudenberg
in Zurich. His publications include Le diable chez l’evêque: Chasse au
sorciers dans le diocèse de Lausanne (vers 1460) (Lausanne, 1999).
Recently he has extended his research interests to fourteenth-
century chronicles.

Alison Rowlandsis Professor in European History, University of Essex.

Her publications include Witchcraft Narratives in Germany:
Rothenburg, 1561–1652 (Manchester, 2003) and, as editor,
Witchcraft and Masculinities in Early Modern Europe (Basingstoke,
2009). She is currently working on masculinity in early modern
Germany and on witchcraft in Rothenburg ob der Tauber.

Walter Rummel is Director of the Landesarchiv, Speyer. Besides

witchcraft persecutions, his research interests are nineteenth-
century agrarian history and National Socialism. His publications
include Hexen und Hexenverfolgung in der Frühen Neuzeit (2nd
edn., Darmstadt, 2012), with Rita Voltmer. He is currently writing a
study of nineteenth-century bureaucracy and village life.

James Sharpe is Professor Emeritus of History, University of York.

Witchcraft is one of his major research areas, as well as crime, and,
more recently, violence, in early modern England. He has published
widely on early modern English witchcraft, most notably Instruments
of Darkness: Witchcraft in England, 1550–1750 (London, 1996).
Maryse Simon is an associated member of ARCHE EA3400 at the
University of Strasbourg. Her most recent book is La sorcellerie et la
ville: Witchcraft and the City (Strasbourg, 2018), edited with Antoine
Follain. She is currently working on urban witchcraft at the
Parlement of Paris and the Alsatian Decapole.

Walter Stephens is Charles S. Singleton Professor of Italian Studies,

Johns Hopkins University. He is author of Demon Lovers: Witchcraft,
Sex, and the Crisis of Belief (Chicago, 2002). He is completing an
edition, translation, and commentary of Gianfrancesco Pico’s De
Imaginatione and Strix for the I Tatti Renaissance Library.

María Tausiet is Senior Researcher, University of Valencia. She has

been a member of the Spanish National Research Council. Her books
include Mary Poppins: Magia, leyenda, mito (Madrid, 2018) and
Urban Magic in Early Modern Spain: Abracadabra Omnipotens
(Basingstoke, 2014). She is currently researching gender and the
Enlightenment.

Raisa Maria Toivo is Professor of History, Tampere University. She is

author of Witchcraft and Gender in Early Modern Society: Finland
and the Wider European Experience (Aldershot, 2008) and Faith and
Magic in Early Modern Finland (Basingstoke, 2016). Her current
project is on Catholic Reformation in Lutheran Finland.

Rita Voltmer is Senior Lecturer in Medieval and Early Modern History,

University of Trier. Her most recent edited book is Herren und Hexen
in der Nordeifel (Weilerswist, 2018). Her current projects are on the
circulation of knowledge, processes of resilience, and criminal justice
in medieval and early modern Europe.

Liv Helene Willumsenis Professor Emerita of History, University of

Tromsø (UiT The Arctic University of Norway). Her books include
Witches of the North: Scotland and Finnmark (Leiden, 2013). In
2019 she was awarded the Norwegian King’s Medal of Merit. She is
currently researching transference of demonological ideas across
Europe.
INTRODUCTION
Demonology and witch-trials in dialogue

Rita Voltmer and Liv Helene Willumsen

This volume provides seventeen studies of demonology and

witchcraft. With a broad comparative approach and geographical
coverage, ranging from Northern Norway to the Iberian Peninsula
and including both Protestant and Catholic milieus of prosecution
and non-prosecution, the present volume takes forward recent
debates about the impact of demonology on witch-trials in a
European context. In illustrating the wide thematic and geographical
range in the chapters below, this introduction focuses first on the
definition of demonology and witch-hunting, and second on the
circulation of knowledge between the two fields of thinking with
demons, and of taking action against demons (exorcism) and
witches (criminal trials). In its third and last part, the introduction
presents a short overview of each of the seventeen chapters.

I
Scholars have been debating the relationship between demonology
and witch-hunting for a long time. In 1959, Rossell Hope Robbins
presented the first English-language encyclopedia of “Witchcraft and
Demonology,” and established a firm link between demonology,
demonologists, and witch-hunts.1 Continuing the line of argument
that had originated with Andrew Dickson White, George Lincoln Burr,
and Henry Charles Lea,2 Robbins belonged to the rationalist school
of witchcraft researchers who focused on the persecutions of the
fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries as part of the “history of
European civilization, or rather un-civilization.”3 He defined witchcraft
as a new heresy, invented by the Inquisition, and demonology as
subordinated to “witchology.” His often reprinted encyclopedia
treated “the scientific study of demons” as the “complement of
witchcraft” and not as the “antithesis of theology.”4
Robbins recognized the complexity of demonology. Drawing on the
treasure trove of the Witchcraft Collection at Cornell University, he
devoted several articles and lists to late medieval and early modern
demonologists (whom he called “witch-ologists”) and their works. He
divided them into categories: early writers on witchcraft to the
publication of the Malleus Maleficarum and from it up to 1550, “the
most famous writers,” “minor demonologists,” and “English
demonologists,” whom Robbins thought of as less influential than the
French ones.5 Two charts listed “Some Notable Books in the
Witchcraft Controversy in England” and “Major English Witch Trials
as Recorded in Contemporary Pamphlets.”6 With his mostly accurate
and still reliable entries,7 Robbins placed demonology between
learned theology and legal practice in local courtrooms. He saw it as
the tool to “bowdlerize” the complex system of knowledge about
demons “into simple language for priests and magistrates on local
levels.”8 In his later introduction to the catalogue of the Cornell
Witchcraft Collection, Robbins proposed three slightly different
categories: the early writers on witchcraft, the classical
demonologists, and the penologists (with the sub-categories of
minor demonologists and lesser penologists).9
Robbins and the other rationalists saw demonologists as using the
obscure and deluding science of demons to instigate and legitimize
witch-hunts.10 Demonology thus became the means to fill the
courtrooms with the call for action against presumed witches. For
the rationalist school, the main reason for witch-hunting was
demonology – including “witchology” and the work of “penologists.”
Robbins’ colourful labels had no afterlife in scholarly debates – with
the notable exception of the term “demonologists” itself.11
 From the 1970s onwards, research in witchcraft, witch-hunting,
and demonology increased, and started to follow separate ways.
More and more, a scholarly consensus formed against the verdict
that demonology, headed by the Malleus Maleficarum, had been the
main instigator of witch-hunts.12 With the magisterial study of Stuart
Clark in 1997, demonologists lost their dubious reputation as
mentally disturbed witch-haters, and their work ceased to be central
in explaining witch-hunting.13 Demonology, as thinking with demons,
was rooted deeply in European intellectual history and its
participating disciplines, such as theology, philosophy, alchemy,
astrology, medicine, and the law. Because it overlapped these
various disciplines, with its own integrating as well as dividing
tendencies, Clark emphasized that “demonology” had not existed as
a fixed science of demons and witches, though the word
“demonology” itself became well known in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, together with its French alternatives such as
“démonomanie” or “démonolatrie.”14 However, the label
“demonologist” can be misleading. The theologians, physicians, or
lawyers who had been occupied in thinking with and acting against
demons were not members of a self-contained group. None of them
had boasted of being a demonologist.15 Nevertheless, the terms
“demonology” and “demonologist” are still in use in scholarly debate,
and even Clark could not abandon or replace them.
Clark defined demonology as:

the name given today to the field of knowledge dealing with

the demonic aspects of witchcraft and other practices
forbidden by early modern Christianity. More broadly,
demonology concerns itself with all forms and expressions of
demonism and is thus as old as the concept of Satan.16

The contributors to the present volume agree that “demonology”

should be understood as a fluid and flexible field of knowledge,
established in almost every genre of textual and visual
representation. Rita Voltmer (Chapter 1) therefore defines as
demonology “all kinds of texts (including images), whose authors of
various religious confessions thought about and debated the extent
of the power of Satan, demons, and witches, about their corporeality
or their illusory nature.” Furthermore, “the umbrella term
‘demonology’ labels a container of ideas, within which assembled
various kinds of cultural attempts to imagine, to explore and to
understand the divine macrocosm and microcosm.”
Writings on “demonology” harboured many a narrative about
witchcraft, magic, possession, and superstition. Every interested
person, learned or not, could cherry-pick specific pieces of
demonology from the container. As a selection of textual jigsaw
pieces, demonology could be at the same time universal and
regional, Catholic and Protestant, urban and rural, high magic and
folk wisdom. Demonology could be heard on the theatre stage, it
could be seen in paintings and illustrations, and it had its
entertaining elements of mockery and laughter.17
Narratives about witches’ flight, metamorphosis, or harmful magic
were flexible patterns, adjustable to particular social, religious, or
political settings. Thinking with demons was also flexible enough to
embrace scepticism.18 There existed no simple dividing-line between
proponents of witch-hunts on one side, and opponents on the other
side. In this volume, Felicity Green (Chapter 8) shows that
scepticism as a field of thinking (and acting, one may add) was as
fluid and volatile as demonology. Jean Bodin used sceptical
arguments in favour of witch-hunts, while Michel de Montaigne used
sceptical arguments to urge caution. Thinking with demons, broadly
defined as cosmology and thus neither absolutely negative nor
positive in regard to witch-hunting, did not automatically pave the
way to witch-trials. Alison Rowlands (Chapter 10) shows that the city
council in Rothenburg ob der Tauber, whose members did not deny
the existence of witchcraft, sought legal opinions in order to gain
solid and cautious arguments not to proceed any further in doubtful
trials.
Therefore, the category of “demonologists” includes several
positions: propagandists of witch-persecution such as Heinrich
Kramer (Institoris) or Martin Delrio, and their adversaries such as
Johann Weyer.19 At the beginning of the great European witch-hunt,
there were men of letters such as Johannes Geiler of Kaysersberg or
Pedro Ciruelo, who argued against superstition. During the decline of
witch-hunting, authors such as the scientist and clergyman Joseph
Glanvill still defended godly cosmology together with demonology.
These men “thought with demons” and can be labelled
demonologists, even though none of them had called for witch-
hunting.20
Another category should be opened for those thinkers who
actually denied the Devil’s existence as a corporeal being. Potentially
one of the most powerful antidotes to witch-hunting was to
emphasize the Devil’s physical limitations and inability to affect
human affairs. When evil spirits could neither contact humans nor
influence the material world, witchcraft was a feeble fantasy, the
outcome of mistranslations of the Bible. However, very few dared to
elaborate these radical anti-demonologies in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. One of the earliest to do so was the Dutch
Anabaptist and spiritualist David Joris (1537), who may have
influenced Weyer.21 Further radical anti-demonologies came from the
English gentleman Reginald Scot (1584), the Dutch Catholic priest
Cornelius Loos (1592/1593), exiled to Trier, and the Dutch Calvinist
Balthasar Bekker (1691).22 Thinking without demons, inevitably,
brought most of these men under the suspicion of heresy and
atheism. Loos, for example, was labelled as patronus sagarum
(patron of witches).23 However, during the seventeenth century,
novels emerged containing anti-demonological notions.24
Wolfgang Behringer has questioned whether demonology was
indeed a unique working system of belief and a discourse, whose
participants gave the same meaning to the same words. “It seems
rather that basic categories meant different things to different
authors, even those of the same generation, depending on the
author’s own agenda.” Behringer argued that a “meaningful
discussion of demonological texts has to be set in the context of the
interests these texts served and the particular situations they were
related to.”25 Most chapters of the present volume have on these
grounds embedded items of demonology in their regional context,
and identified the impact of individual thinking and arguing with
demons in their specific social and political milieu. Like Behringer,
more and more scholars have seen demonology as one of the basic
factors with which to analyse witch-hunts.26
These arguments return us to the question of when, where, and
how demonology and witch-hunts connected. Recent scholarly
discussion has focused on one central “thought with demons” that
linked to witch-hunts: the idea of the witches’ meeting. This was
imagined as a multi-membered and two-gendered sabbat with
sexual orgies, cannibalism, and blasphemous acts of adoring the
Devil (mostly in Catholic milieus not under the jurisdiction of the
Roman, Venetian, Spanish, or Portuguese Inquisition) or as a
witches’ gathering, mainly attended by women and with more festive
than sexual or blasphemous acts (mostly in Protestant locations).
But, whether horrific or festive in their details, witches’ meetings
were imagined “with demons,” and thus were closely connected to
linked trials. Linked trials, which can be called witch-hunts, were
based primarily on the collective matrix of a secret alliance of
witches, which in different confessional contexts with different labels
was understood as a heretical sect, acting as the Devil’s minions.
Witch-hunting almost always legitimized itself with the horrific
narrative of the witches’ conspiracy, meeting at so-called gatherings
or sabbats.
It seems significant that European Protestant milieus developed a
concept of the witches’ gathering that focused on the conspiratorial
elements, without elaborating it with sexual and blasphemous acts.
We find this in Germany (e.g. duchy of Württemberg, imperial cities
such as Rothenburg ob der Tauber), Scotland, England, Norway,
Denmark, and Finland.27 However, even in its enjoyable, mostly non-
sexual, and “positive” form, as Liv Helene Willumsen (Chapter 13)
puts it, the Protestant witches’ gathering remained an inverted
place. In Denmark, women were served by male boy-devils. In
Norway, women danced, drank, and played forbidden card games,
without any subordination to males except the Devil. The sabbat
always kept its most vital character, as the place where witches
conspired with the Devil. Demonology encouraged the view of
witches as members of a Satanic criminal gang, who violated godly
order and whom the law had to prosecute.
In the late witch-hunt in Sweden (the Blåkulla trials), the sabbat-
narrative was prominent. This notorious witch-hunt could not have
developed its dynamics without the sabbat-matrix, which the
circulation of knowledge had introduced. It initially spread from
German lands to Sweden, and then via Scotland bounced back to
the Lutheran lands in the Holy Roman Empire and the transatlantic
colonies in New England, influencing late cases of possession and
witch-trials.28 Another demonological connection crossed the North
Sea: the idea of personal servant-demons was known in Norway and
Denmark (where they were called “Apostles”), and in England
(where they were shaped as animals and called “familiars”).29
Today, most experts in the field avoid the phrase “witch-craze,”
which was used frequently in older histories of witchcraft.30 Since
Brian Levack published the first edition of his ground-breaking book
in 1987, the term “witch-hunt” has been conventional, though
sometimes used vaguely.31 It points to the fact that witch
persecutions, be they legally conducted or by lynching, needed an
active search for these presumed evil-doers. However, there has to
be a distinction between individual trials and linked trials with
several persons involved; only the latter should be called “witch-
hunts.”32 The number of linked trials, labelled as witch-hunts, could
differ greatly from region to region. Only one witch-hunt occurred in
what is today Finland; under the auspices of the judge Nils Psilander
in Åland, seven women were executed in the 1660s. For the first and
only time, these witch-trials were based on the diabolical sabbat-
matrix. Raisa Maria Toivo discusses the indirect influence on
Psilander of Continental demonologists such as Martin Delrio
(Chapter 14). Compared with the major persecutions in Northern
Norway, or in German lands with hundreds of people executed at the
stake, the Åland trials appear to be a minor witch-hunt.33
 This well-known connection of witch-hunting and demonology
should not distract us from noticing that village witchcraft or single
trials, likewise, may well have been related to narratives from
demonology, as Julian Goodare discusses in the concluding chapter
(Chapter 17). In their chapters below, Liv Helene Willumsen
(Chapter 13) and Jari Eilola (Chapter 16) show how at the local level
and in face-to-face communities with oral communication, learned
and folkloric patterns of thinking with demons mixed in many
ways.34 Demonological narratives crossed political, confessional,
linguistic, and social boundaries, with a constant flow of ideas and
practices. The circulation of knowledge happened through the
medium of texts and images (e.g. pamphlets, leaflets, tracts,
correspondence), in specific situations (e.g. trials, exorcisms), and –
most of all – because of travelling, reading, hearing, speaking, and
working with demons, performed by individuals.

II
We see that ideas of demonology were transferred, exchanged,
negotiated, and elaborated.35 Tracts, pamphlets, and leaflets
transmitted ideas about demons and the crime of witchcraft into
local and regional milieus. Rita Voltmer (Chapter 1) outlines how the
media helped to connect political demonology and witch-hunting,
focusing on the demonologists’ urgent need to use the laboratory of
the local courtroom to prove their thinking with demons. Walter
Stephens (Chapter 4) comes to similar conclusions. In Italy,
inquisitors and secular witch-hunters were convinced that witches
bodily copulated with the Devil, the most intimate corporeal
communication with demons. The early witch-trials in Mirandola, and
the tract about them written by Gianfrancesco Pico in 1523 (Strix),
served as ultimate proof, mouthed by the voice of the witch herself.
Even before then, the handwritten texts of demonology from the
fifteenth century experienced a wide circulation. Georg Modestin
(Chapter 2) shows that, with transcribing, a text metamorphosed
into a new piece of demonology since the author filtered in his own
interpretation and his local knowledge. The findings of Marion
Gibson and James Sharpe (Chapters 5 and 6) outline clearly how the
“popular demonic” was established in England. We may add the
importance of translation as a vital tool of communication. Some
pamphlets from France and Germany, including Continental Catholic
demonology, were translated into the English or Danish languages.
They transported ideas about the witches’ sabbat, the Devil’s pact,
metamorphosis, and the cases of notorious witches such as the
Catholic witch-cleric Louis Gaufridy into new legal, religious, and
political contexts.36
Sometimes the experiment of implementing new ideas about
demons and witches failed, but at other times, these ideas found
fertile ground. Walter Rummel (Chapter 3) introduces to us the
striking example of a German monk who, after reading the
Formicarius of Johannes Nider and the Malleus Maleficarum, felt the
experience of true enlightenment. He circulated his knowledge about
the true crime of witches by means of sermons and catechetical
missions to the populace, and thereby instigated witchcraft trials
according to the newly found matrix of a secret sect of diabolic
witches. A similar experience of conversion might have enlightened
the judge Nils Psilander in Åland after having consulted the tract on
demonology and witchcraft of Michael Freude, a Lutheran minister.
Raisa Maria Toivo (Chapter 14) points out that the tract was a
treasure trove of narratives from demonology, since it included
references to Catholic and Protestant promoters of witch trials and
adversaries to them. Psilander selected those pieces of the
demonological jigsaw puzzle that best suited his arguments. As Rita
Voltmer argues in Chapter 1, judges, lords, district governors,
theologians, or ministers, who were involved on both sides of the
debate in witch-trials, did not have to be experts in it. They merely
had to use one authoritative reference work, such as the handbooks
of Martin Delrio, Francesco Maria Guazzo, or Michael Freude. Many
demonological works were compilations, so people could use them
to obtain a range of different views.
 Another way of adopting demonological ideas is shown by Alison
Rowlands (Chapter 10). The municipal jurist in Rothenburg, Georg
Christoph Walther, who wrote a manuscript treatise on witchcraft in
1652, picked more than thirty authorities from both sides of the
witchcraft debate, and relied on Catholic as well as Protestant texts.
The legal opinions (Gutachten) written to advise the council of
Rothenburg reveal another level of connectivity between
demonology and witch-hunting, also shown in the case of Psilander.
Narratives could be used in different contexts with a different
meaning. Jigsaw pieces from the two Catholic hardliners Binsfeld
and Delrio were used, not only to prosecute suspected witches, but
also to defend them. Julian Goodare (Chapter 7), in discussing
demonological ideas of witches’ flight, shows Scottish lawyers on
both sides of witchcraft trials drawing on these ideas. But whereas
the witches’ gathering became well known in Scottish trials as a
matrix of collaboration with the Devil, witches’ flight was discussed
more superficially. King James VI developed a unique opinion on
witches’ flight in his treatise Daemonologie, but it had no impact on
actual trials. Some Scottish lawyers knew Continental demonology,
but followed the same habit as their Protestant colleagues in
Germany or Finland: they referred to Bodin and Delrio piecemeal.
Sometimes they even used them to defend presumed witches, a use
which did not follow the main purpose of these authors’ demonology.
Nicolas Rémy seems to be another prominent figure in the long
line of prosecuting judges. However, Rita Voltmer and Maryse Simon
(Chapter 9) present the Lorraine judge as a demonologist who had
initially participated only at a distance in actual witch-trials. The
judicial system in Lorraine allowed him no direct, personal impact on
the witch-hunts. The reception of his tract finally allowed him to take
his place in the media bolstering persecution.
The connection between demonology and witch-hunting is
sometimes blurred. One notable example of a narrative about the
witches’ sabbat popped up in witch-trials in several widely separated
European locations: the narrative that a glass drum was played with
fox tails. Jens Chr. V. Johansen (Chapter 11) argues that there must
have been a connection between these narratives. They may well
have travelled with purely oral communication of soldiers and
merchants. Demonological narratives in trial records, thus, were not
always introduced by leading questions during the court session or
during torture. Bits and pieces of learned and popular thinking with
demons were transmitted orally. Rita Voltmer, Liv Helene Willumsen,
James Sharpe, Louise Nyholm Kallestrup, and Julian Goodare,
amongst other contributors to the present volume, underline the
power of orality to connect demonology with witch-hunting.
We should identify specific situations of oral communication in
which elements of demonology were circulated. The church, with
sermons and announcements from the pulpit, made an important
impact.37 However, we do not know what the audience memorized,
nor how they mixed learned instruction with other material in their
imaginations. The courtroom and the prisons offered venues for oral
circulation of knowledge. Liv Helene Willumsen and Jari Eilola
emphasize the agency of imprisoned women and children in creating
their own stories about demons and witchcraft – but the stories
eventually had to be matched up with the expectations of the judges
(Chapters 13 and 16).
Another dramatic venue for oral communication of demonology
was the public exorcism. Exorcisms could be conducted by licensed
experts such as the Jesuits, or by unlicensed impostors such as the
Spanish Carmelite friar whose case María Tausiet presents (Chapter
15). Coming from the very mouth of the possessed, witchcraft
accusations targeted individual persons and led directly to witch-
hunts. The connection between demonology, possession, and witch-
hunts becomes obvious in many German and French witch trials. In
the Iberian Peninsula, by contrast, the scepticism of the Inquisition
blocked this connection as long as no secular courts were involved.38
A final connection between demonology and witch-hunting, made
by persons in power, was particularly important. Here, we encounter
what can be called either “political demonology” (Rita Voltmer,
Chapter 1) or “prosecuting demonology” (Julian Goodare, Chapter
17). These related concepts interpreted witchcraft as the final
assault against godliness and Christianity, requiring it to be
prosecuted unremittingly. Princes, lords, members of city councils,
ministers, priests, exorcists, inquisitors, and secular judges had
responsibility for decisions whether or not to conduct witch-trials.
They might make their decision on the basis of their knowledge
about demons, or because of their prior experience with presumed
witches. Powerful individuals also had networks of family, dynasty,
holy orders (e.g. the Jesuits), education, and profession, influenced
by the multi–voiced, multi-layered multiverse of demonology in all its
textual and visual manifestations and performances.
The personal or human factor is present in every chapter of this
volume. These include the monk Wilhelm of Bernkastel, reading the
Malleus Maleficarum (Rummel); the secular lord who hunted witches
with the help of inquisitors and wrote about demonology (Stephens);
the English judge introducing the demonology of Bodin into local
witch-hunts (Gibson); individuals reading English pamphlets and
creating the popular demonic (Sharpe); the Scottish lawyers using
narratives about witches’ flight (Goodare); Bodin and Montaigne with
their contrasting use of scepticism (Green); the Lorraine judge
publishing admonitory narratives of demonology and witch-trials to
gain social profit and to entertain (Voltmer and Simon); members of
the council of Rothenburg, legal experts, and ministers, who used
narratives of demonology for their respective interests (Rowlands);
sabbat narratives transmitted by individuals over long distances
(Johansen); ministers and district governors using the pulpit to
circulate knowledge about demons and witches (Kallestrup); a
district governor from Scotland in the service of the Danish king
bringing demonology to Northern Norway (Willumsen); the Åland
judge instigating Continental styled witch-trials (Toivo); the
Carmelite friar profiting from unlicensed exorcism (Tausiet); and
finally, the Swedish children fabricating sabbat stories and
denunciations (Eilola). And Julian Goodare, in his concluding chapter,
underlines again the vital role of the individual, whose experience,
education, and mentality influenced the incidence of witch-trials at
the local or regional level.
Demonology (including scepticism) was not a fixed system and an
autonomous learned discourse, which connected only rarely to
witch-hunting. On the contrary, demonology was a work in progress,
a container of narratives, which offered legitimation to those in
favour of witch-hunts, but also arguments for their opponents to
bolster caution. Contrary to the definitions of Rossell Hope Robbins,
demonology was not the instrument or the tool to instigate witch-
trials. Demonology needed a medium, the specific situation and the
interest of individuals to circulate its message and its ideas to
different locations (rural or urban), different religious milieus, and
different political and legal settings. Demonology as part of Christian
doctrine built a bridge between the southern and northern parts of
Europe, and between Protestant and Catholic regions. The impact of
Catholic and Protestant demonology on witch-trials in Orthodox
regions, and its transmission from Western to Eastern Europe via
translations and travelling persons, requires to be scrutinized in
further detail.39
With the circulation of knowledge, and at the local level, scribes,
judges, and legal advisers, as well as bystanders, witnesses, and
accused witches themselves, all participated in discourse and
practice. The worst effect on witch-trials probably came from
popular demonology (Sharpe and Willumsen) or middle-range
demonology (Goodare), transmitted verbatim and applied by local
people in their call for witch-trials. Between 1400 and 1750, with the
circulation of knowledge, demonology caused deadly trials as well as
a keen debate, which was embedded in the discourse about God,
the power and material existence of Satan, and cosmology. It could
be said that facts – in the form of witch-trials and exorcisms –
followed fiction – in the form of narratives of demonology.40

III
Chapters 2–16 in this volume take a regional and stratified approach
to the questions posed by Goodare, Voltmer, and Willumsen as
editors of the book. Some chapters deal with sophisticated
demonological thought, while others are more focused on the
development or reception of specific demonological ideas in
particular areas. The role of ideas within the witch-trial environment
itself is frequently emphasized. The result is a connection of
demonology and witch-hunting stretching from Western Continental
Europe (Switzerland, Italy, France, the Holy Roman Empire, Spain)
via England and Scotland to the union of Denmark–Norway and the
kingdom of Sweden including Finland. In the book the chapters are
arranged in roughly chronological order, but here they are discussed
region by region.
Western Continental Europe, where since the beginning of the
fifteenth century most works of demonology were published and
witch-hunts with thousands of executions took place, is represented
by seven chapters. Georg Modestin (Chapter 2) explores the
development of the Errores Gazariorum, one of the earliest treatises
in which the witches’ sabbat was described. The text was handed
down in three manuscript Latin versions and in a German
translation. Traces of actual witch-hunting filtered into each of the
subsequent versions. The earliest of those traces reaches back to a
trial in the Valley of Aoste – where the Errores is thought to have
been written – in 1428. The latest extant version is the German
translation by Matthias of Kemnat, a court chaplain of Frederick I,
Count Palatine. This translation contains allusions to the persecution
of witches in the region of Heidelberg in the 1470s. The chapter
discusses the subsequent “metamorphoses” of the Errores, paying
special attention to Mathias’s middle high German translation. These
findings concerning the various editions of the tract show that
judicial practice in witchcraft trials from different areas may have
influenced the development of demonology.
Walter Rummel (Chapter 3) presents a rare example of how the
reading of demonology created a new “enlightened” understanding
of the witches’ crime. The Augustinian monk Wilhelm of Bernkastel,
who lived between 1485 and 1536 in the monastery of
Eberhardsklausen, near the city of Trier, documented in his writing
on miracles the impact the Formicarius and the Malleus Maleficarum
had made on his mind. Henceforth, the scientific reputation of
Johannes Nider and Heinrich Kramer (Institoris) and their apparent
“experience” became key points of reference to prove the superiority
of the new witchcraft theory over traditional demonological notions.
Wilhelm contributed to local witch trials, using his new knowledge to
analyse and explain the misfortunes of ordinary people. Thus,
Rummel gives us a glimpse of how the major sixteenth-century
prosecutions in the Rhine, Meuse, and Moselle region were preceded
by the establishing of demonology.
Walter Stephens (Chapter 4) shows that Gianfrancesco Pico della
Mirandola wrote his book Strix (The Witch, or On the Deceptions of
Demons) in 1523 to defend an Italian witch-hunt in which he had
participated, and which eventually resulted in the execution of seven
men and three women. Staging a discussion between an inquisitor
and two Christian laymen, the dialogue is a frank and graphic
exposition of the hidden agendas of witchcraft theory. In accord with
the theory of the Malleus Maleficarum, Pico’s Strix gives the
eponymous “Witch” a voice and brings her on stage as an expert
witness to the reality of witchcraft. More explicitly than other
witchcraft theorists, Pico shows how the alleged crimes of witches,
especially copulation with demons and demons’ transportation of
witches through the air, served to guarantee the reality of the world
of spirits. Demonology could be a cosmology and a science to
understand the spiritual world, a proof for demons to exist, and a
legitimation of witch-hunting; here the connections between all of
these were explicit.
Felicity Green (Chapter 8) argues that scepticism was not a solid
field of knowledge apart from demonology. The epistemology of
witchcraft belief and unbelief in late sixteenth-century France
situated demonology in the context of the revival of ancient
scepticism. Its initial starting-point is Jean Bodin’s defence of
demonology against Pyrrhonism in the preface of De la
démonomanie des sorciers (1580). This is followed by the critique of
demonological reasoning – and probable retort to the Démonomanie
– offered in the Essais (1588–1592) of Bodin’s contemporary and
fellow humanist magistrate, Michel de Montaigne. Both authors
deployed sceptical arguments and tropes, but to opposite ends. A
moderated philosophical scepticism, emphasizing the limits of human
understanding and knowledge, was compatible with both belief and
doubt concerning witchcraft phenomena. Bodin’s assessment of
witchcraft was no less coherent and rational, in its own terms, than
Montaigne’s.
Rita Voltmer and Maryse Simon (Chapter 9) revisit the well-known
Lorraine judge Nicolas Rémy and his Demonolatry, published in
1595. In broadening the perspective and in taking in the German-
speaking lands of Lorraine, the chapter further undermines any
assumption that Rémy was responsible for the Lorraine witch-hunts.
However, the impact of Rémy as a prominent figure in Lorraine’s
elite should be noted. He could encourage trials by using his family
connections and friendship networks with the judges and other
members of the ducal high court. Rémy’s published demonology
made its greatest impact indirectly, through its reception by Martin
Delrio into the latter’s compendium on witchcraft and magic,
Disquisitiones Magicae, published in 1599–1600.
Alison Rowlands (Chapter 10) studies the impact of demonological
texts on witch-hunts. She closely analyses the formal legal opinions
(Gutachten) commissioned by the city councillors of the Lutheran
imperial city of Rothenburg ob der Tauber on cases of witchcraft
between 1561 and 1709. Most Gutachten were written by jurists.
Rowlands identifies the specific demonologies that they cited, and
how these changed over time. These demonological texts never
operated in a vacuum, but were interpreted and mediated by
individual men who read and used them according to various
personal and professional priorities. Demonological ideas spread in
many different ways, verbally as well as in print, and in religious and
social as well as legal contexts. In Rothenburg, the knowledge of
demonology was generally used to block witch-hunting instead of
instigating persecution.
The final chapter from Western Continental Europe is that of María
Tausiet (Chapter 15). She discusses popular exorcists in
seventeenth-century Spain, and the ways in which the Inquisition
tried to enforce orthodoxy. Her case-study is the trial of Friar Juan
Girona, accused in Valencia in 1674 of superstition and heresy.
According to his own boastful declarations, he had an extraordinary
power over heaven and hell, being able to cast out countless
demons from possessed people. A key characteristic of this popular
and lower demonology was that, unlike the theoretical abstractions
of clerical culture, the demons conjured by Juan always manifested
themselves in material and concrete ways. The demons’ action on
the body of the possessed woman can be compared with rituals of
penitence in which the friar abused his spiritual authority with his
female patients. Sensuality and mysticism were mixed in this
personal version of demonology, which Tausiet labels “unofficial
demonology” – noting that this was not necessarily “popular
demonology.” However, the possessed woman had no voice of her
own. Exorcism was a dramatic public occasion where knowledge
about demons and witches could be spread.
Whereas England saw the execution of about 400 witches, in
Scotland about 2,500 women and men were executed for the
alleged crime of witchcraft.41 Both kingdoms are represented in this
volume. Marion Gibson (Chapter 5) studies an English pamphlet of
1582 which gives an account of preliminary examinations related to
recent witchcraft trials in Essex. Reproducing these legal documents,
the pamphlet gives insight into the pre-trial interrogation carried out
by the local magistrate, Brian Darcy. By close reading on linguistic
grounds, Gibson argues that there are similarities between the
pamphlet’s text and Jean Bodin’s De la Démonomanie des Sorciers of
1580. Darcy adopted interrogation techniques from Bodin. By using
lies and subtle manoeuvres of power to make the suspected women
break down, Darcy was successful in obtaining their convictions.
However, his effort to introduce French demonological ideas in
England ultimately failed, as opposition to Bodin’s Catholic and
Continental methods grew on legal, religious, and national grounds.
Gibson’s chapter concludes with a discussion of Reginald Scot’s The
Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), which criticized Darcy.
James Sharpe (Chapter 6) questions one of the conclusions of
Keith Thomas and Alan Macfarlane, the pioneer scholars of English
witchcraft. They downplayed the importance of the demonic pact,
maintaining that witchcraft beliefs in England were mainly concerned
with maleficium. Sharpe closely studies English witchcraft pamphlets
from 1566 until 1712, arguing that they display an English “popular
demonic” – demonological ideas known among the common people.
Through a diachronic and thematic analysis of the pamphlets,
Sharpe displays the occurrence of ideas about familiars from 1566
onwards, likewise the notion that witches were agents of Satan. By
1585, the demonic pact was clearly expressed as the idea of the
witch giving a familiar her soul in return for the ability to perform
harm. The pact retained its importance until 1712, the end of
English witch trials. However, fantasies about sexual intercourse with
the Devil as part of the pact ritual came late to England and
remained rare.
Julian Goodare’s analysis of the demonological understanding of
Scottish witches’ flight (Chapter 7) is based on a wide range of
sources. Goodare proposes the term “middle-range demonology” to
characterize Scottish demonological ideas, emphasizing their more
modest originality and quality compared to leading Continental
demonological tracts such as those of Bodin or Delrio. Bodily flight or
spirit flight were discussed frequently, from King James VI’s book
Daemonologie (1597) until around 1730, as long as witchcraft trials
took place in Scotland. Bodily flight implied that witches were
physically carried by the Devil or another demon over a long
distance. Spirit flight meant either that the witch’s spirit really flew,
leaving their body, or that they flew in fantasy. Flight in fantasy
could be a sceptical idea – it was only a fantasy. These ideas were
discussed and spread through demonological books, pamphlets, and
treatises, through discussions at universities, through pleadings in
court, and through accounts of trials. Influence from Continental
demonological thinking is present, complementing discussions based
on knowledge about local witchcraft trials. After 1700, interest in
debates on witches’ flight dropped sharply.
The witch-trials in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland, and
their connection with demonology, are studied in five chapters. Jens
Chr. V. Johansen (Chapter 11) focuses on motif analysis, particularly
a motif appearing in confessions in witchcraft trials in both Denmark
and Germany. He asks how a story containing demonological ideas is
transmitted from one distant place to another. The motif in question
is a drummer entertaining at the witches’ sabbat, playing on a glass
drum with fox tails. Johansen draws attention to the appearance of
this striking motif in witchcraft confessions in Ribe in Denmark
(1642), in Barntrup in Germany (1660), and again in Rugård near
Ebeltoft in Denmark (1686). This motif shows that learned European
ideas were known in certain areas of Denmark. Pointing to oral
transfer of witchcraft ideas when travelling persons met, Johansen
suggests different ways of possible transfer of the idea in question:
adult people’s exchange of stories as well as children’s potential
participation in transmission.
Louise Nyholm Kallestrup (Chapter 12) discusses several
demonological notions that appear in Danish witchcraft trials. She
begins with a survey of early trials, legislation on witchcraft, and
ecclesiastical writings. The bulk of Danish witchcraft trials (60 per
cent) took place during the five years following the Witchcraft
Decree of 1617. In Denmark, the use of torture was not allowed
before the verdict was passed. Through close reading of trial
records, Kallestrup argues that demonological ideas were expressed
after the verdict – under torture. This was also when other suspects
were denounced. The chapter clarifies the descriptions of the
sabbat, and the personal devil that the Danish witches confessed to
having at their disposal. Kallestrup concludes by reflecting on the
merging of demonological and popular ideas of witches and
witchcraft in local communities.
Liv Helene Willumsen (Chapter 13) uses the method of close
reading of confessions in order to analyse courtroom discourse.
Based on court records from Finnmark, Northern Norway, a district
that suffered severe witchcraft persecution, Willumsen examines the
notions of witches’ gatherings, documented in several linked trials.
Through the voice of the accused person as it appears in the
confession, a range of descriptions of witches’ gatherings comes to
the fore. Names of places appear, ranging from internationally
known to locally known, and show the vast scope of notions
inhabiting the beliefs of the common people in Finnmark’s fishing
villages. In oral societies, where stories were eagerly told from
mouth to mouth, travelling persons transmitted ideas even to the
Arctic. Narratives about activities at witches’ gatherings show a
merging between learned ideas and traditional folk belief.
Demonological ideas were gradually assimilated in the mentality of
the local communities, eventually being retold in witches’
confessions. These demonological ideas carry the stamp of individual
storytellers as well as an echo of learned books from further south in
Europe. The Finnmark version of the witches’ sabbat displays the
strength of women who maintain their integrity by using their
narrative talents in a situation of extreme vulnerability and pressure.
Raisa Maria Toivo (Chapter 14) focuses on the notions of
witchcraft expressed in the Baltic islands of Åland (today part of
Finland but then ruled by Sweden) in the 1660s. These notions
resemble the ideas of witchcraft that later came to the fore in the
Swedish Blåkulla trials. Focusing on the district judge, Nils Psilander,
his background, education, and learned knowledge, Toivo gives a
glimpse of the man behind the only linked trials in Finland.
Demonological ideas such as the demonic pact, the sabbat, and the
Devil’s mark come to the fore. Psilander’s university studies in Tartu,
with its German teachers, help to explain his knowledge of these
ideas. His references to demonological works, to the Bible, and to
Swedish and German law – he cited the German Carolina code –
appear to portray a Swedish judge with broad knowledge of the
European learned landscape. However, closer examination shows
that his knowledge was fragmented and second-hand. Moreover,
Psilander some years later lost his belief in demonology, and then
cited European literature in order to urge caution in witchcraft trials.
Jari Eilola (Chapter 16) applies the technique of close reading to
the testimonies given by children during the Blåkulla trials in Sweden
(1668–1676). Eilola considers several discourse aspects. The judicial
procedure influenced the stories told by children, and the way these
testimonies were formed as narratives. The judges believed the
children’s testimonies to be true. The children’s creativity and
imagination filled the testimonies, using motifs and images drawn
from widely different sources. Many demonological notions in the
children’s testimonies were different from orthodox demonology but
retained a basic resemblance to motifs known in other European
countries. However, ideas existing among the common people also
found their way into the children’s stories. The children’s
denunciations of women whom they claimed to have seen in
Blåkulla, taking part in the witches’ sabbat, resulted in several
sentences of execution. Eilola’s chapter clearly shows the individual
touch to each child’s testimony.
The chapters by Rita Voltmer (Chapter 1) and Julian Goodare
(Chapter 17) frame the more specialized chapters in the present
volume. In a broad survey of the connection between political
demonology and witch-hunting, Voltmer opens the field of old and
new research on the transmission and circulation of knowledge
between demonology and witch-trials. She discusses the interlinked
levels of transmission via translation, manuals, guides, legal
opinions, broadsheets, and pamphlets, and looks at how actual trials
influenced thinking and writing about demons and witches.
Inquisitors and secular judges sought keenly for actual confessions
from the courtrooms, because the admission of guilt – extracted
from the very mouths of witches – manifested the material reality of
demons. Committed to a divine political order, demonologists called
for intense witch-hunting. The advent of political demonology
underlined the relevance of confessions. The torture chamber and
the courtroom, thus, became the laboratory in which the witches
provided first-hand evidence for the demons’ machinations as they
battled against God’s order.
Finally, Julian Goodare (Chapter 17) gives a broad overview of
scholarly debates and historiography on the connection or
disconnection of demonology and witch-trials. His central question is
how research on demonology and witch-hunting might be
reconnected. He concludes by bringing together ideas by major
demonologists as well as demonologists working on lower levels.
Some of these, whatever their level, were “prosecuting
demonologists” who demanded executions. However, other writers
discussed demonological ideas without displaying interest in
witchcraft trials. A long chronological perspective shows that the
earliest “non-prosecuting demonologists” emerged in the thirteenth
century (if not before), two centuries before the idea of demonic
witchcraft. And “non-prosecuting demonologists” continued, well into
the eighteenth century, to discuss relationships between humans
and demons. As for the “prosecuting demonologists,” their voice was
heard loudly from the late fifteenth century until the end of the
seventeenth century. Their distinctive message was: Witches must
be executed.

Notes
1 Rossell Hope Robbins, The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology
(London: Peter Nevill, 1959).
2 The rational (or liberal) school opposed what has been called the romantic
(or folkloristic) school of witchcraft research. The latter were mostly
influenced by Margaret Murray, whom Robbins rejected firmly. See Rita
Voltmer, “Ein Amerikaner in Trier: George Lincoln Burr (1857–1938) und sein
Beitrag zu den Sammelschwerpunkten ‘Hexerei und Hexenverfolgungen’ an
der Cornell University (Ithaca/New York) sowie an der Stadtbibliothek Trier:
Mit einem Inventar,” Kurtrierisches Jahrbuch 47 (2007): 447–489; Walter
Rummel and Rita Voltmer, Hexen und Hexenverfolgung in der Frühen Neuzeit,
2nd ed. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2012), 7–13; Julian
Goodare, The European Witch-Hunt (London: Routledge, 2016), 363–370;
Kathleen L. Sheppard, The Life of Margaret Alice Murray: A Woman’s Work in
Archaeology (Plymouth: Lexington, 2013), 161–195.
3 Robbins, Encyclopedia, 1; Francis Lee Utley, “The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft
and Demonology by Rossell Hope Robbins,” Modern Philology 59 (1961): 128–
130.
4 Robbins, Encyclopedia, 123–126 (entry “Demonologists”), 126–130 (entry
“Demonology”).
5 Robbins, 145–147 (listing 30 writers and their works), 123 (Jean Bodin, Peter
Binsfeld, Nicolas Rémy, Martin Delrio, Henri Boguet, Francesco Maria Guazzo,
Pierre de Lancre, Ludovico Maria Sinistrari), 123–124 (twelve writers and
works, starting with Lambert Daneau and ending with Bartholomäus Anhorn),
and 125 (King James VI, Richard Bovet, Nathaniel Crouch, Richard Baxter,
Richard Boulton).
6 Robbins, 167–169.
7 Walter Stephens, “Robbins, Rossell Hope (1912–1990),” in The Encyclopedia
of Witchcraft: The Western Tradition, ed. Richard M. Golden (Santa Barbara:
ABC-CLIO, 2006), 4:965–966.
8 Robbins, Encyclopedia, 126.
9 Rossell Hope Robbins, “Introduction,” in Witchcraft: Catalogue of the
Witchcraft Collection in Cornell University Library, ed. Martha J. Crowe
(Millwood: KTO, 1977), pp. ix–xxcviii, esp. xx–xliii. “Penologists” were legal
experts, judges, and jurists, writing about how to eradicate witchcraft with
trials. The categories of demonologists and penologists overlapped, for
example with Pierre de Lancre and Henri Boguet.
10 Wolfgang Behringer, “Historiography,” in Golden, Encyclopedia, 2:492–498.
11 Stuart Clark used the Cornell Catalogue, but not Robbins’ encyclopedia or the
introduction.
12 Julian Goodare, “Connecting Demonology and Witch-Hunting in Early Modern
Europe,” Chapter 17 below in the present volume, at pp. 346–347.
13 Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern
Europe (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997). See also Stuart Clark, “Demonology,” in
Golden, Encyclopedia, 1:259–263; Stuart Clark, “Witchcraft and Magic in Early
Modern Culture,” in Bengt Ankarloo, Stuart Clark, and William Monter,
Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: The Period of the Witch Trials, Athlone
History of Witchcraft and Magic in Europe, vol. 4 (London: Athlone, 2002),
97–169, esp. pp. 122–132.
14 Timothy Chesters and Thibaut Maus de Rolley, “Le Diable dans la
bibliothèque: La classification des traités de démonologie dans les catalogues
bibliographiques aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles,” Early Modern French Studies 39,
no. 1 (2017): 2–16.
15 Clark, Thinking with Demons, pp. viii–ix.
16 Clark, “Demonology,” 259.
17 See Goodare, “Connecting Demonology and Witch-Hunting,” 353–357 and
Rita Voltmer, “The Mirror of Witches (1600): A German Baroque Tragedy in
Context,” in Cultures of Witchcraft in Europe from the Middle Ages to the
Present, ed. Jonathan Barry, Owen Davies, and Cornelie Usborne
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 79–99.
18 See Matteo Duni, “Skepticism,” in Golden, Encyclopedia, 4:1040–1050, and
Walter Stephens, “The Sceptical Tradition,” in The Oxford Handbook of
Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America, ed. Brian P. Levack
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 101–120.
19 James Sharpe, “Demonologists,” in The Oxford Illustrated History of
Witchcraft and Magic, ed. Owen Davies (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2017), 65–96, at p. 89.
20 Goodare, “Connecting Demonology and Witch-Hunting,” 357, 367–369.
21 Gary K. Waite, “‘Man is a Devil to Himself’: David Joris and the Rise of a
Sceptical Tradition Towards the Devil in the Early Modern Netherlands, 1540–
1660,” Nederlands archief voor kergeschiedenis/Dutch Review of Church
History 75 (1995): 1–30.
22 Sharpe, “Demonologists,” 89–96; Waite, “Man is a Devil,” 6–7; Hans de
Waardt, “Abraham Palingh en het demasqué van de duivel,” Doopsgezinde
 Bijdragen 17 (1991): 75–100; Andrew Fix, Fallen Angels: Balthasar Bekker,
Spirit Belief, and Confessionalism in the Seventeenth Century Dutch Republic
(Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999); Hoon J. Lee, The Biblical Accommodation Debate
in Germany: Interpretation and the Enlightenment (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2017).
23 Rita Voltmer, “Demonology and Anti-demonology: Binsfeld’s De
confessionibus and Loos’s De vera et falsa magia,” in Jan Machielsen, ed., The
Science of Demons: Early Modern Authors Facing Witchcraft and the Devil
(London: Routledge, 2020), 149–164.
24 Goodare, “Connecting Demonology and Witch-Hunting,” 356–357.
25 Wolfgang Behringer, “Demonology, 1500–1660,” in The Cambridge History of
Christianity, vol. 6: Reform and Expansion, 1500–1660, ed. Ronnie Po-Chia
Hsia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 406–424, esp. pp. 423–
424 (quotations).
26 Rita Voltmer, “Witch Hunts,” Golden, Encyclopedia, 4:1209–1214, esp. p.
1211; Rummel and Voltmer, Hexen und Hexenverfolgung, 43–44, 86;
Goodare, European Witch-Hunt, 8; Liv Helene Willumsen, Witches of the
North: Scotland and Finnmark (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 7–10, 323–328.
27 See the chapters of Alison Rowlands, James Sharpe, Louise Nyholm
Kallestrup, Liv Helene Willumsen, and Raisa Maria Toivo in the present
volume. On the diverse confessional characteristics of the witches’ gathering
or sabbat in the Holy Roman Empire, see Rita Voltmer, “Hexenjagden im
Westen und Norden des Alten Reiches: Ein struktureller Vergleich,” @KIH-
eSkript. Interdisziplinäre Hexenforschung online 2 (2010): 1–31,
https://archiv.historicum.net/no_cache/persistent/artikel/8969/.
28 See Alison Rowlands, “The Witch-Cleric Stereotype in a Seventeenth-Century
Lutheran Context,” German History. Published ahead of print, June 13, 2019,
https://doi-org.ezproxy.is.ed.ac.uk/10.1093/gerhis/ghz034; Rita Voltmer,
“Debating the Devil’s Clergy: Demonology and the Media in Dialogue with
Trials (14th to 17th Century),” Religions 10, no. 12 (2019), 648,
https://doi.org/10.3390/rel10120648.
29 See James Sharpe, “English Witchcraft Pamphlets and the Popular Demonic,”
Chapter 6 below in the present volume; Liv Helene Willumsen, “Trolldom mot
kongens skip 1589 og transnasjonal overføring av idéer,” Historisk tidsskrift
(Denmark) 119, no. 2 (2019): 309–344; Charlotte-Rose Millar, Witchcraft, the
Devil, and Emotions in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 2017), 48–
81.
30 Rita Voltmer, “Witch Trials,” in Davies, Oxford Illustrated History, 97–133,
esp. pp. 99–100.
31 Brian P. Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe (London: Longman,
1987). See now the fourth edition (London: Routledge, 2015), and Voltmer,
“Witch Hunts.”
32 Several authors have tried to establish categories to classify the scale of
witch-trials, including William Monter, Brian P. Levack, Wolfgang Behringer,
and Julian Goodare. See Rummel and Voltmer, Hexen und Hexenverfolgung,
74–79; Goodare, European Witch-Hunt, 225–266.
33 See Willumsen, Witches of the North, 223–319; Voltmer, “Witch-Trials,” 101–
104 (charts).
34 See also Thomas V. Cohen and Lesley K. Twomey, ed., Spoken Word and
Social Practice: Orality in Europe (1400–1700) (Leiden: Brill, 2015), with the
chapter of Liv Helene Willumsen, “Oral Transfer of Ideas about Witchcraft in
Seventeenth-Century Norway,” 45–83.
35 See Voltmer, “Debating the Devil’s Clergy” (with further references);
Willumsen, “Trolldom mot kongens skip,” 318–343; Liv Helene Willumsen,
“Relations between 17th-Century Witchcraft Trials in Scotland and Finnmark,
Northern Norway,” in Hexenwissen: Zum Transfer von Magie- und Zauberei-
Imaginationen in interdisziplinärer Perspektive, ed. Heinz Sieburg, Rita
Voltmer, and Britta Weimann (Trier: Paulinus, 2017), 97–110.
36 See Rita Voltmer (Chapter 1) and Julian Goodare (Chapter 17) below in the
present volume, and Thibaut Maus de Rolley, “The English Afterlife of a
French Magician: The Life and Death of Lewis Gaufredy (1612),” in
Seventeenth-Century Fiction: Text and Transmission, ed. Jacqueline Glomski
and Isabelle Moreau (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 34–48; Louise
Nyholm Kallestrup, “‘Kind in Words and Deeds, but False in Their Hearts:’ Fear
of Evil Conspiracy in Late-Sixteenth-Century Denmark,” in Barry, Davies, and
Usborne, Cultures of Witchcraft, 137–153, at pp. 140–142; Alison Rowlands,
“Gender, Ungodly Parents and a Witch Family in Seventeenth-Century
Germany,” Past and Present 232 (Aug. 2016): 45–86, esp. pp. 74–77;
Rowlands, “Witch-Cleric;” Voltmer, “Clergy.”
37 Cf. Natalie Grace, “Witchcraft, Reformation and Sermons in Early Modern
Germany, 1530–1630” (MA dissertation, University of Nottingham,
Department of History, 2018); Ildiko Sz. Kristof, “‘Charming Sorcerers’ or
‘Soldiers of Satan?’ Witchcraft and Magic in the Eyes of Protestant/Calvinist
Preachers in Early Modern Hungary,” Religions 10, no. 5 (2019), 328,
https://doi.org/10.3390/rel10050328; Rita Voltmer, “Preaching on Witchcraft?
The Sermons of Johannes Geiler of Kaysersberg (1445–1510),” Contesting
Orthodoxy in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Heresy, Magic and
Witchcraft, ed. Louise Nyholm Kallestrup and Raisa Maria Toivo (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 193–215, and Louise Nyholm Kallestrup, “‘He
Promised Her So Many ‘Things’: Witches’, Sabbats, and Devils in Early Modern
Denmark,” Chapter 12 below in the present volume.
38 See among other titles Gunnar W. Knutsen, Servants of Satan and Masters of
Demons: The Spanish Inquisition’s Trials for Superstition, Valencia and
Barcelona, 1478–1700 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009); Gustav Henningsen, The
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sufferings must have been before the evening when, in the middle of the
play, he rushed through the stage door, clad as an abbé, to be seen no more
at his beloved Comédie française. In an amusing account published in a
leading Paris paper of a visit to see Robertson's comedy, School, he wrote:

"Les décors sont executés de main de maître. C'est le triomphe de

l'exactitude. Les comédiens sont excellents. M. Bancroft joue dans la pièce
un rôle de grand gommeux à monocle, et rien n'égale son élégance et sa
stupidité. Madame Bancroft joue la pensionnaire gaie: cette petite femme
est un mélange d'Alphonsine et de Chaumont—gaie, pimpante, mordante et
d'une adresse! ... C'est la great attraction du Théâtre de Haymarket.

"Après je reviens rapidement en cab ("hansom") à mon hôtel, et je me

demande en chemin pourquoi les cabs vont si vite? C'est tout simple; les
cabs vont très vite parce que les cochers les poussent derrière."

No less an authority than David Garrick once said to an ambitious stage

aspirant who sought his advice, that he might humbug the public in tragedy,
but warned him not to try to do so in comedy, for that was a serious thing.
This opinion was borne out by Voltaire, who, in his anxiety not to imperil
the success he had achieved in tragedy, when he wrote his first comedy did
so anonymously.

Joseph Having pleasant memories of two distinguished

Jefferson American actors—one a comedian, the other a tragedian—I
will follow the high opinion held by the great Englishman of
Thalia's children, and write first of Joseph Jefferson, incomparably the
finest actor who has come to us from America, and who in his day made a
powerful impression and won enduring fame by his performance of Rip Van
Winkle and his new rendering of Bob Acres in The Rivals, which he
admitted was not free from liberties with Sheridan. I can think of no actor
who has been more beloved by audiences in his native land. I must, of
course, use that expression, although his grandfather, or perhaps great-
grandfather, was British, and an actor under David Garrick. He was, as it
were, cradled on the stage.

Jefferson might also have made fame and money by his brush. His work
was worthily hung upon the walls of the Royal Academy. I cherish two of
his paintings: one, a gift to my wife in remembrance of a happy day we all
spent together on the Thames, a charming example of one of its many
backwaters near Cookham; the other—a purchase—of Shakespeare's church
at Stratford-on-Avon—both reminiscent of Corot. The former always
suggests to me the misty Hebrides and an appropriate background for the
"Island that liked to be visited," in Barrie's Mary Rose.

Gazing, I remember, at the old Maidenhead bridge at sunset, Jefferson

murmured: "What a lovely place is this England of yours! How I should
just like to lift it in my arms and carry it right away."

When Edwin Booth, the American tragedian, came over to play in

London, Millais gave him a dinner, and invited the leading players of the
day to make his acquaintance. He was a fine actor; especially so, I thought,
in The Fool's Revenge and Richelieu. When he drew the "awful circle"
round the shrinking form of the young heroine and said to the villain of the
play: "Set but a foot within that holy ground and on thy head—yea, though
it wore a crown—I launch the curse of Rome!" you felt you were in the
presence of high dramatic art. The performance at the Lyceum Theatre, in
which he and Irving alternated the parts of Othello and Iago, created great
interest. Booth was the better Othello; Irving the more attractive and less
conventional Iago.

Booth would now and then dine with us on a Sunday evening—to help
him bear a sorrow which is, at such times, the actor's lot, and which an
extract from a letter to a close friend will best explain:

"I am tired in body and brain. The poor girl is passing away from us.
For weeks she has been failing rapidly; and the doctors tell me that she is
dying. You can imagine my condition: acting at random every evening, and
nursing a half-insane, dying wife all day, and all night too, for that matter. I
am scarce sane myself. I scribble this in haste at two in the morning, for I
know not when I will have a chance to write sensibly again."

The room in which Edwin Booth died—which I have visited—at the

Players' Club in Grammercy Park, New York, founded by himself, and
where he had been so beloved, was left untouched after he had passed away,
and, I understand, so remains.

When I was a lad of seventeen I went for a trip to New York, and during
my stay I chanced to see Edward Askew Sothern—to give him his full
name—play his world-renowned character, Lord Dundreary, for the first
time in his life. Some years later, when we met upon the stage, I gave him
my copy of the original playbill, which, of course, had great interest for
him. The eccentric nobleman drew all playgoers for years in England as
well as in America. At the time I mention I saw Sothern and Jefferson act
together in a round of old English comedies. As young men they made giant
successes in individual parts—Dundreary and Rip Van Winkle—the one a
masterpiece of caricature, the other a veritable old Dutch master.

Another of Sothern's chief parts, in those days, was David Garrick, of

which he was the original representative, long before the play was taken
over and prominently associated with the career of Charles Wyndham.

Sothern was always kind to me, whether in my early days in the

provinces or afterwards in town. He was my guest at the first dinner-party I
had the courage to give. Among those who sat with him were Dion
Boucicault, W. S. Gilbert, W. R. McConnell and Tom Hood. I was a young
host, not having struck twenty-six. He was a fearless rider and hunting man.
Once, after he had met with a bad accident, following the staghounds, I
went to see him at his charming old house, called The Cedars, in
Kensington, and found his bed placed in the middle of the room. The house,
when I last saw it, had become a home for cripples.

Sothern was the king of practical-jokers and would stop at nothing in

the way of thought, time or money, to carry out his wild projects. A poor
game at its best, I have often thought in mature age; a selfish form of
innings.

He was an intense admirer of my wife's art. Only after he had passed

away did it come to my knowledge that in some stage experiences,
published in America, with the title Birds of a Feather, he gave his
judgment of her.

"Among the actresses I should certainly place Mrs. Bancroft and Mrs.
Kendal in the foremost rank, their specialities being high comedy. Mrs.
Bancroft I consider the best actress on the English stage; in fact, I might say
on any stage."

Sam Sothern, so long a pleasant actor on our stage, is dead, so his

father's name and fame are now successfully held by his son, Edward, in
America.

Dion One of the most remarkable of Victorians in stage-land

Boucicault was Dion Boucicault, father of my life-long little friend,
"Dot," the accomplished husband of Irene Vanbrugh.
Boucicault produced his first comedy, London Assurance—a brilliant one in
its day—about the date of my birth, when he himself was not more than
twenty-one. He was a colossal worker as author, actor, and producer until
1890; a career as distinguished as it was lengthy. His delightful Irish plays,
The Colleen Bawn, Arrah-na-Pogue and The Shaughraun, were among the
joys of my youth. I first met Boucicault at Birmingham, where I was
specially engaged to act his own part, the counsel for the defence in his
drama The Trial of Effie Deans. I learnt much from him at the one rehearsal
he travelled from London to attend. When about half way through the trial
scene he took me aside and told me I was wrong in my treatment of the
part, adding: "Let me rehearse the rest of the scene for you, and I am sure
you will grasp my own idea of it directly." I saw at once how right he was,
how wrong I had been. The result was a considerable success for me. In the
early days of our managerial career we produced a comedy of his, How She
Loves Him—clever, but not one of the best. A situation at the end of an act
became very muddled, after being tried at rehearsal in several ways. An
idea struck me, which was a distinct improvement, but I hardly dared to
interfere with so great an autocrat, kind as he had always been. At last, in
despair, I suggested to Boucicault that his original ending of the act was
more effective than that he had changed it to. He said: "What was that?" I
then boldly explained my own idea as if it were his. No doubt he saw
through the strategy, but merely said: "Perhaps you're right," and rewarded
my shrewdness by adopting the suggestion.

When, years afterwards, I asked his consent to my making some

alterations in London Assurance and combining the fourth and fifth acts, he
replied from Chicago: "Your shape of London Assurance will be, like all
you have done, unexceptionable, and I wish I could be there to taste your
brew."

Rest and rust Later on, when my wife was taking only a small part in
some of our plays, he wrote:

"MY DEAR FRIEND,—Will you feel offended with an old soldier if he

intrudes on your plan of battle by a remark?

"Why are the Bancrofts taking a back seat in their own theatre; they
efface themselves! Who made the establishment? with whom is it wholly
identified? of what materials is it built? There—it's out!

"Tell Marie, with my love, that there is nothing so destructive as rest if

persisted in; you must alter the vowel—it becomes rust, and eats into life.
Hers is too precious to let her fool it away; she is looking splendid, and as
fresh as a pat of butter. Why don't you get up a version of The Country
Girl? Let her play Hoyden and you play Lord Foppington."

Boucicault was a perfect host, a brilliant talker and sympathetic listener.

I first dined with him, when a young man, in the delightful company, I
remember well, of Charles Reade, J. M. Bellew and Edmund Yates. On the
menu was printed: "The wine will be tabled. Every man his own butler.
Smiles and self-help." And there was cognac of 1803 from the cellars of
Napoleon III. I had many years of unbroken friendship with Boucicault. His
final words to me were in a letter from America, following on an illness:

"I doubt whether I shall cross the ocean again. I am rusticating at

Washington, having recovered some strength, and am waiting to know if
my lease of life is out, or is to be renewed for another term. I have had
notice to quit, but am arguing the point ('just like you,' I think I hear you
say), and nothing yet is settled between Nature and me."

He was a hard worker, and said his epitaph should be: "Dion
Boucicault; his first holiday."

Where shall my pen wander next?

Montague and I can revive memories in the old—and tell a little to the
Coghlan young—of actors who became prominent as members of our
companies at different times. Let me try to do so. First, there
was Harry Montague. Without being an actor of high rank, he had a great
value as a jeune premier. He was what I heard an American describe as "so
easy to look at." His charm of manner made him a special favourite
everywhere, and he was the original matinee idol. When in his company he
had the gift of making you believe that he had thought but of you since your
last parting, and, when he said "good-bye," that you would remain in his
memory until you met again.

He was in America, acting in Diplomacy, when he died suddenly; as

young in years as he always seemed in heart; for he was but midway
between thirty and forty, that age upon the border-land when one has to own
to being no more young, while resenting for a little while that ambiguous
epithet, "middle-aged."
 Charles Coghlan was an actor of a higher grade; gifted, cultivated and
able: his acting as Alfred Evelyn and Charles Surface in our elaborate
revivals of Money and The School for Scandal was of the highest character.
It may be interesting to note that when he first joined our company his
salary was £9 a week; during his last engagement we paid him £60, which
would be doubled now. I asked him once to accompany me on a short
holiday abroad, and found him a delightful companion. This was soon after
the siege of Paris, when many of the terrible stains left on the fair city's face
were sadly visible.

Coghlan often lived outside London, at places like Elstree and

Kingsbury, generally in picturesque old houses. My wife and I rode out to
one of them to luncheon. For a time he drove a rather ramshackle four-in-
hand, and, naturally, was in constant financial trouble. He ended his career
rather recklessly in America, at Galveston, and his body was washed out to
sea from the catacombs by a flood. It was afterwards recovered and
reburied.

The father of the happily present Dion and Donald Calthrop, a

connection of Lord Alverstone, John Clayton (Calthrop) was also a fine
actor. His performance in All for Her was of a high order, and he did some
admirable work with Irving at the Lyceum. I also recall a remarkable piece
of acting on his part in a play, adapted from the French, in which he
appeared as a father whose brain was turned by his having accidentally shot
his little son. Under our flag, he only acted in Diplomacy and Caste. He was
then growing fat, and never knew of a strong wish I had to revive the Merry
Wives of Windsor, with himself as Falstaff. He was otherwise engaged,
unfortunately. This was when that brilliant actress Mrs. John Wood was
with us, to play with my wife the two Merry Wives, supported by myself as
the jealous Mr. Ford—I always found the portrayal of jealousy very
amusing—and a troupe of able and suitable comedians.

Clayton gave remarkable performances in the joyous comedies by

Pinero at the Court Theatre. He died young.

Arthur Cecil Arthur Cecil comes next to my mind: an amiable

gentleman and companion. It was I who, when he was
"wobbling," as he did on every subject, induced him to go on the
professional stage. He seemed to me to pass a large slice of his life in the
effort—or want of effort—to make up his mind on trivial things, and so
wasted at least one half of it.

At the dress rehearsal of Diplomacy—in which he gave a fine

performance of Baron Stein—he appeared with a totally different make-up
in each act. They were all clever and appropriate, but we, not he, had to
decide for him which was to be finally adopted. He was very devoted to
what Sir James Barrie christened "Little Mary." On one occasion, after
dining at the Garrick Club, before his evening's work, having finished his
meal with a double helping of orange tart, he was leaving the coffee-room,
when he saw a friend seated near the door just beginning his dinner. Cecil
sat down opposite to him for a few minutes to exchange greetings; he
became so restless and agitated at the sight of a dish of stewed eels that at
last he dug a fork into a mouthful, saying, "I must," and so wound up his
meal. There are several similar stories extant, equally amazing, equally true.

Henry Kemble Our old and staunch friend, Henry Kemble, a descendant
of the illustrious stage family whose name he bore, was for
years a valued member of our company; a capable but restricted actor, from
his peculiarity of diction. My wife christened him "The Beetle," owing to a
large brown Inverness cape he wore at night. Many are the amusing stories
told of him. He fought the income tax strenuously, and on one occasion,
being brought to bay, told the collector that he belonged to a precarious
profession, and begged that Her Majesty might be asked not to look upon
him as a source of income!

Kemble was well up in Shakespeare, and had a greater knowledge of the

Bible than any actor I have known, except one.

This reminds me of a visit paid, at his instigation, on a New Year's Eve,

in the company of his close friend, Arthur Cecil, to a midnight service held
in one of the big churches. They entered reverently, just before the hour, and
were about to kneel, when a verger touched Kemble on the shoulder and
said: "I beg your pardon, gentlemen, but this is a service being held for
fallen women."
 Kemble suddenly made up his mind to retire from the stage and end his
days in Jersey, not in a cloistered cathedral city, as he said would be the
case. He, unfortunately, invested his savings in an annuity, as he only lived
a few months after doing so. He came to see my wife, to whom he was
much attached, to say good-bye, and brought her some fine Waterford glass
as a farewell gift. When fatally ill, his last words were written to her on a
telegraph form: "All over, dear, dear Lady B. Blessings on you all. Beetle."
The doctor who attended him transcribed the words, and sent my wife the
tremblingly-written farewell he had penned himself—a touching and kind
act.

Another friend and comrade of those days was the humorous Charles
Brookfield, son of Canon Brookfield, a distinguished preacher. My wife and
I gave the young undergraduate what was practically his first engagement,
and he remained a popular member of our company during the whole of our
career at the Haymarket. Several of his performances showed marked
ability, notably in Sardou's play, Odette, and Pinero's comedy, Lords and
Commons. Many amusing stories are attributed to him. Against the
accuracy of one of them I must rebel. It ran in this way: That at a time when
Charles Wyndham was appearing in his favourite part of David Garrick, for
a run, he was sitting in the club named after the great actor, just under one
of his several portraits there, when Brookfield went up to Wyndham and
said: "It really seems quite surprising, you grow more like Garrick every
day." Wyndham gave a delighted smile; when Brookfield continued, in his
peculiar cynical way: "Yes, every day, but less like him every night." A
good story; but, unfortunately, Brookfield was never a member of the
Garrick Club.

Charles I think it was Brookfield who, when a friend asked his

Brookfield advice, saying that a member of a club they frequented
having called him a "mangy ass," whether he should appeal
to the committee or consult a solicitor, quietly told him he thought it a case
for a vet to decide.

He wrote various amusing comedies, and, later on, was appointed by the
Lord Chamberlain to be joint examiner of plays.
 Brookfield had his serious side, and wrote us the following letter,
affectionately signed, when we retired from management:

"The sadness I feel at the prospect of never again working under your
management is far too genuine for me to endeavour to convey it by any
conventional expressions of regret. Although I have always appreciated
your unvarying goodness to me, it is only by the depression of spirits and
general apathy which I now experience, that I recognise how much my
enjoyment of my profession was affected by the kind auspices under which
I had the good fortune to practise it."

IX

THE STAGE

II

"Pity it is that the animated graces of the player can live no longer than the instant
breath and motion that presents them, or at best can but faintly glimmer through the
memory of a few surviving spectators."

Henry Irving I will now write of the man who was for many years the
chief of the English stage, Henry Irving. He was a born
leader and had the magnetism which compels the affection of his comrades;
he knew that to be well served meant first to be well beloved. Although
denied the advantages of early education, Irving had the learning which
colleges may fail to teach; and in his later years would have graced, in
manner and in aspect, any position in life. This personal attribute came to
him gradually, when, as it were, he had recreated himself. Truth to tell, in
the early part of his career he had none of it. In those distant days there was
a strong smack of the country actor in his appearance, and a suggestion of a
type immortalised by Dickens in Mr. Lenville and Mr. Folair.

We soon became friends and remained so throughout his remarkable

career—the most remarkable in many respects that ever befell an actor. He
told me an interesting incident of his early life. He was engaged, in the
summer of 1867, to act in Paris. The enterprise proved a failure. The little
troupe of players was disbanded and returned to London, with the exception
of Irving, who, finding himself abroad for the first time, lingered in the
bright city for a couple of months. He lived in a garret on a few francs a
day, and paid nightly visits to the cheap parts of the theatre. Although he
had no knowledge of the language, he was all the while studying the art of
acting in its different grades and kinds.

When, in later years, he entertained in his princely fashion eminent

foreign artists, in answer to compliments showered upon him in French, he
would, without the slightest affectation—a failing from which he was free
—answer simply: "I am sure all you are saying is very kind, but I don't
understand a word of it."

Soon after his success as Digby Grant in James Albery's comedy, Two
Roses, shortly before what proved to be the turning-point in his career—his
becoming a member of the Lyceum company, then under the Bateman
management—I had occasion to see a well-known dramatic agent, who, as I
was leaving his office, said: "Oh, by the way, would Henry Irving be of use
to you next season? I have reason to believe he would welcome such a
change." The question was startling. I replied that I should be delighted, but
feared it would be difficult, as Hare, Coghlan and myself would be in his
way. How possible it is that a different answer might have influenced future
events in theatre-land! Then came his memorable performance in The Bells,
which gave him fame in a single night, followed by other early triumphs,
Charles the First and Hamlet.

I once saw Irving on horseback, cantering in the Row on a Sunday

afternoon: it was a singular experience. His companion was George
Critchett, who gave up his practice one day in the week to hunt instead, and
who was as much at home on a horse as Irving was plainly uncomfortable.
 Later on, Irving was speaking to me of the success of one of our plays. I
answered that in my belief the same could be achieved at the Lyceum (the
theatre was not yet under his own management), if money were freely and
wisely spent. But wide is the difference between spending and wasting.
While the disasters which darkened his brilliant reign were sometimes, it
must be conceded, the result of errors of judgment in the choice of plays,
had he been in partnership with a capable comrade, to whose guidance he
would sometimes have submitted, he might have realised a fortune, instead
of allowing several to pass like water through his hands. As an artistic asset,
Irving was often wasted and thrown away.

Let me turn for a moment from the stage side of this extraordinary man.

A toy theatre In the gloaming of a Christmas Day, full forty years ago,
my wife and I were sitting alone, when, to our amazement,
Irving was announced. It was a bolt from the blue. After a pleasant talk, we
asked him who was to have the pleasure of giving him his pudding and
mince-pie. He answered that he should be all alone in Grafton Street with
his dog. We told him that ourselves and our son George, then a small boy,
comprised our party, and begged him to join us. Irving gladly said he
would. At the time he was acting in The Corsican Brothers, of which
famous melodrama Master George had his own version in his little model
theatre, with an elaborate scene of the duel in the snow, represented by
masses of salt smuggled from the kitchen; and this, with managerial pride,
he told Irving he would act before him after dinner. To an audience of three
the performance was solemnly gone through, being subjected to the
criticisms, seriously pronounced and respectfully received, of the great
man. I seem to hear his voice crying out: "Light not strong enough on the
prompt side, my boy." For years a broken blade of one of the rapiers used in
the duel at the Lyceum, given to him by Irving, was among the boy's proud
possessions. I daresay he has it still. A memorable Christmas evening!

The idea occurred to me to give a supper to Irving before his first visit
to America in 1883, and to let it have a distinctive character by inviting
none but actors. Feeling that nowhere could be it so appropriately given as
in the Garrick Club, I wrote to my fellow-members of the Committee to ask
if, in the special circumstances, it might take place in the dining-room.
Greatly to my delight, my request was granted, with the remark, that it was
"an honour to the Club." The attractive room, so suitable for the purpose, its
walls being lined with the portraits of those whose names recall all that is
famous in the great past of our stage, was arranged to accommodate a party
of a hundred, of whom there are but very few survivors. A humorous
drawing of a supposed wind-up to the supper—Irving, Toole and myself
staggering home, arm-in-arm—was among the early successes of Phil May.
He made two copies of it. One of the three belonged to King Edward, which
I afterwards saw at Sandringham, the others are owned by Pinero and
myself.

In acknowledgment of a little present I sent Irving at this time he wrote:

"I shall wear your gift—and a rare one it is—as I wear you, the giver, in
my heart. My regard for you is not a fading one. In this world there is not
too much fair friendship, is there? And I hope it is a gratification to you—it
is to me, old friend—to know that we can count alike upon a friend in
sorrow and in gladness."

"The Dead When Irving contemplated a production of The Dead

Heart" Heart, he flattered me by saying that unless I appeared with
him as the Abbé Latour he would not carry out the idea. I
was then free from management, and tried to persuade him to let me
undertake the part as a labour of love, but he would not listen. After a long
talk—neither of us, I remember it all so well, looking at the other, but each
gazing separately at different angles into Bond Street from the windows of
the rooms he so long occupied at the corner of Grafton Street—he said that
I must content him by being specially engaged, on terms which soon were
settled.

It was a strange experience to re-enter a theatre to serve instead of to

govern; and in one where the policy was so different. My wife and I had so
often been content to choose plays without regard to ourselves: the policy
of the Lyceum was upon another plane. The Dead Heart is a story of the
French Revolution, on the lines of A Tale of Two Cities. The best scene in
the play was between Irving and myself, in which we fought a duel to the
death. A clever drawing of the scene—I regret failing to secure it when it
was sold at Christie's—was made by Bernard Partridge. From all I have
heard said of it, the fight must have been well done—real, brief, and
determined. It was a grim business, in the sombre moonlit room, and
forcibly gave the impression that one of the two combatants would not
leave it alive. I confess that I had not the courage of Terriss, who found
himself in a similar position with Irving when they fought a duel in The
Corsican Brothers, and boldly attacked his chief by suggesting that a little
of the limelight might fall on his side of the stage, as Nature was impartial.

A tribute from One night during the hundred and sixty on which The
Irving Dead Heart was acted, when we had acknowledged the
applause which followed the duel, Irving put his arm round
me as we walked up the stage together, and said: "What a big name you
might have made for yourself had you never come across those Robertson
plays! What a pity, for your own sake; for no actor can be remembered long
who does not appear in the classical drama."

I fear egotism is getting the better of me. Irving once said:

"One point must strike all in connection with Bancroft's career—before

he left the Haymarket, at the age of forty-four, he was the senior theatrical
manager of London. In conjunction with that gifted lady who was the
genius of English comedy, he popularised a system of management which
has dominated our stage ever since, and the principle of which may be
described as the harmony of realism and art."

It is to be much regretted that no really satisfactory portrait of Irving

exists. The one painted by Millais, and given by him to the Garrick Club in
1884, is a beautiful work of art, but, to my mind, somewhat effeminate in its
beauty. A portrait by Sargent, painted when Irving was fifty, and exhibited
at the Royal Academy in 1888, was amazingly clever, but a somewhat
painful likeness. The great painter showed something in the great actor—as
he so often does in his sitters—which his gifted and searching eyes could
not help seeing, and which, once having been shown, you cannot afterwards
help seeing always. Irving hated the portrait, and when it was taken from
the walls of the Academy it was never seen again. I heard Irving, at my
table, tell Sir Edward Poynter that he hid it away in a garret, and when he
left the old Grafton Street chambers, his solitary home for many years, he
hacked the canvas to shreds with a knife. What a treasure lost!

Irving's hospitality was unbounded. At one of his many parties I

recollect his saying to Frank Lockwood, when he was Solicitor-General:
"The fortunate actor is the actor who works hard." He then pointed across
the table to me, and added: "Look at that fellow, and remember what hard
work meant in his case. 'B' is the only actor since Garrick who made a
fortune purely by management of his own theatre—I mean without the aid
of provincial tours and visits to America." After a pause he continued: "But
he has paid the penalty of leaving his best work as an actor undone."

Knighthood It will ever be remembered that Henry Irving was the

first actor to receive from his Sovereign the honour of State
recognition: so placing his calling on a level with the rest, no more to be
looked at askance, but recognised as leading to a share of the distinctions
enjoyed by his fellow-men.

For a year or more before the end it was manifest to those who loved
him that the sword had worn out the scabbard—it hung so listlessly by his
side. This I strongly realised the last time he sat at our table, and was struck
by his plaintive manner to my wife and to me. He then had a flat in Stratton
Street, and left us at midnight, saying that he must be home before the lift
ceased running or he would have to be carried upstairs.

In affectionate remembrance I close my tribute to Henry Irving. His

remarkable career has taken its place in the history of his country, for he
was one of the leaders of men who earned the privilege, given to but few, to
become the property of the world.

It may also be truly said of Irving, as of one of the most distinguished of

his predecessors: "He who has done a single thing that others never forget,
and feel ennobled whenever they think of, need not regret his having been,
and may throw aside this fleshly coil like any other worn-out part, grateful
and contented."

Although I knew and loved them from their boyhood, I find it difficult
to write of Irving's sons, being, as they were, so overpowered by the
dominant personality of the father.

"H.B." and They both went to Marlborough. "H.B." afterwards to

Laurence New College, Oxford. Laurence left school for Paris, to
perfect his knowledge of French, his ambition and
inclination being the diplomatic service. He then passed some three years in
Russia, acquiring mastery of the difficult language. Unhappily, his wished-
for career had to be abandoned for want of the imperative funds. "H.B." was
called to the Bar, but lacked the necessary patience, and so abandoned a
profession, as was thought by many competent judges, in which he was
eminently qualified to take a high position; while his "hobby" until the end
was criminology, and he wrote remarkable books on that fascinating
subject.

Both sons drifted on to the stage. Before that step was taken I had seen
"H.B." at Oxford give a striking performance, for one so young, of King
John.

Later on, I had no wish to see him act a long round of his father's old
parts.

Towards the end of the War he left his work at the Savoy Theatre and
devoted himself to hard work in the Intelligence Department at the
Admiralty, which proved to be a great strain upon him. We met frequently
at that time, by appointment, at the Athenæum, hard by, and had luncheon
together, as he did with his close friend, E. V. Lucas. It was manifest then
that his fatal illness had begun.

Laurence was a more frequent guest of ours than Harry, especially at

Christmas time, having no children to command his presence at home; he
was not so trammelled on the stage as his brother; it was easier for him to
escape from perpetual reminders. The performances I remember best on his
part are his high-class acting in Typhoon and the admirable drawing of a
character he played in The Incubus, who is, in point of fact, his mistress and
has become sadly in the way. My wife and I saw the play together from a
stage box, and were much amused at the end of it by a conversation
between what we took to be a young married couple in the stalls, just
beneath us.

The girl said: "Good play, isn't it?" The man answered: "Capital. I've
only one fault to find with it." "What's that?" "Title." "Title, why it's a
perfect title." The man: "Rotten title—it's nothing about an incubus." The
girl: "It's all about an incubus." The man: "The thing was never once
mentioned." The girl, in amazement: "What is an incubus?" The man:
"Why, one of those things in which they hatch chickens."

The sons died at an age that is not closed to hope and promise, which
now must be handed on to another generation—Laurence and Elizabeth, the
children of Harry Irving, both gifted with good looks and charm. The boy
distinguished himself during the War in the Air Force and now shows
promise as a painter. My love descends to them.

J. L. Toole Extremes meet; they always do and always will. The

closest friend Henry Irving had was J. L. Toole. The strong
affection between the two men, which lasted until the end, began when
Toole was making a name on the stage in Edinburgh and Irving only a
beginner. The famous comedian belonged, as it were, to "the City," and was
educated at the City of London School. He was a close second to Sothern in
inventing practical jokes, generally harmless, and would take as infinite
pains to carry them through. I remember a silly story he loved to tell, how,
after a bad baccarat night at Aix-les-Bains, he went to the bank to draw
money on his letter of credit. Tapping at the guichet, he inquired of the clerk
in feeble, broken English how much the bank would advance upon a gold-
headed cane which he carried. As might be expected, the little window was
slammed in his face. Nothing daunted, Toole made his way to the market-
place hard by, and bought from various stalls some small fish, a bunch of
carrots, and a child's toy; he then returned to the bank and arranged his
purchases on the counter, with the addition of his watch, a half-franc piece
and a penknife. When all was ready he again tapped at the window, and, in
a tremulous voice, implored the clerk to accept these offerings in pledge for
the small sum needed to save him from starvation. The clerk indignantly
requested Toole to leave the establishment, explaining, in the best English
at his command, that the bank only made advances upon letters of credit. At
the last-named word Toole broke into smiles, and, producing his letter of
credit, handed it to the astonished clerk, with the explanation that he would
have offered it at first had he thought the bank cared about it, but the porter
at his hotel had emphatically told him the bankers of Aix preferred fish.

Toole was never the same after the painful death of his son: he became
more and more a slave to "late hours," but was still a delightful, buoyant
companion, beloved by his comrades and friends.

Wilson Barrett was a good actor of the robust type. He had an

adventurous career: sometimes high on the wave of success, at others deep
down in the trough of the sea of failure, but always strictly honourable. At
the old Princess's Theatre, in Oxford Street, he made large sums by good
dramas like The Silver King and The Lights of London, and lost them
through the failures of ambitious efforts, which included a youthful Hamlet,
to be wiped out in turn by the enormous success of The Sign of the Cross, a
religious drama that appealed to a large public which rarely entered
theatres. The play provoked Bernard Shaw to say that Wilson Barrett could
always bring down the house with a hymn, and had so evident a desire to
personate the Messiah that we might depend upon seeing him crucified yet.

William Terriss A restless, untamable spirit was born in William Terriss.

He tried various callings before settling down to the one for
which he was so eminently fitted. He embarked in the mercantile marine,
but the craze only lasted a fortnight. Then came tea-planting in China. The
next experiment was made in medicine, to be followed by an attack upon
engineering. He then positively bluffed me into giving him an engagement,
and made his appearance on the stage. Suddenly he decided to go sheep
farming in the Falkland Islands. He made an early marriage, and his
beloved Ellaline was born there. Of course he soon came back; returned to
and left the stage again; next to Kentucky to try horse-breeding. Another
failure brought him to his senses. Five years after he had first adopted the
stage he was an actor in earnest and became one of its greatest favourites.
 His career was chiefly identified with the Lyceum and the Adelphi; but
he first became prominent by his acting as Thornhill in Olivia, under Hare's
management at the Court Theatre. His bright, breezy nature was a tonic,
and, like his daughter and her husband, Seymour Hicks, he carried sunshine
about with him and shed it on all he met. He was as brave as a lion and as
graceful as a panther.

Alas! one Saturday evening the town was horrified as the tragic news
quickly spread that Terriss had been fatally stabbed by a malignant madman
as he was entering the Adelphi Theatre to prepare for his evening's work. At
his funeral there was an extraordinary manifestation of public sympathy.

Lionel Monckton told me a curious story of how when he reached home

he found that a clock which Terriss gave him had stopped at the hour of the
murder.

However briefly, I must record grateful thanks for past enjoyment given
us by Corney Grain, as great a master in his branch of art as that friend of
my youth, John Parry. His odd name was often wrongly thought to be
assumed, as was that of a dramatist of those days, Stirling Coyne, who
rejoiced in the nickname of "Filthy Lucre."

I always remember the stifled laughter of my wife and Corney Grain,

who was present with ourselves at a dinner party, when a distinguished
foreigner, accredited by Spain to the Court of St. James, was announced by
a nervous manservant as the "Spanish Ham..."—a long pause being
followed by a trembling sotto voce—"bassador."

"Gee Gee" and George Grossmith, the elder—"Gee Gee"—is of course

"Wee Gee" best remembered by his long connection with the Gilbert
and Sullivan operas. To their great success he contributed a
share of which he was justly proud. After he left the Savoy Theatre he
toured as an entertainer, with excellent financial results, both here and from
two visits to the United States. When he returned for the second time, I
remember his saying to me, in his funny, plaintive way: "Do you know, my
dear 'B,' things are really very sad. The first time I came back from America
I found myself spoken of as 'Weedon Grossmith's brother,' and now, after
my second visit, I am only 'George Grossmith's father.'"
 I have always looked upon Weedon Grossmith—"Wee Gee"—as an
admirable actor, and his death as bringing a personal loss, having valued his
friendship and his company. On the stage I best remember him in Pinero's
comedies, The Cabinet Minister and The Amazons, in A Pantomime
Rehearsal, and, towards the end of his career, in a remarkable performance
of a demented odd creature, who believed himself to be the great Napoleon.
My wife was so impressed by the acting that she wrote to our little friend
about it in a way which delighted him beyond words. Weedon was educated
as a painter, and became an exhibitor at the Academy and other galleries. I
have two charming examples from his brush, which I bought at Christie's.

The Great War dealt severe blows to the stage, many a young life of
promise being taken. The toll was heavy; but they are honoured always by
their comrades and remembered for their valour, as are those who served so
bravely and survived. During those terrible years the stage also lost E. S.
Willard, Lewis Waller, Herbert Tree, William Kendal and George
Alexander—all men in the front rank; every one hard to replace.

I associate Willard with his success in The Silver King, and afterwards
in Henry Arthur Jones's plays, The Middleman and Judah. In these he had a
prosperous career through the United States—as in the part in which I best
remember him—the old man in Barrie's comedy, The Professor's Love
Story, a charming piece of artistic work. He owed a modest fortune to the
appreciation he met with in America.

Willard had an ambition to build a theatre at the top of Lower Regent

Street, where the County Fire Office, so long a London landmark, stood;
but, granting the site to have been available, it had no depth: the theatre
could only have been erected on a part of the Regent Palace Hotel, and
reached by burrowing under the road—so far as my architectural
knowledge serves me. With the demolition of the County Fire Office the
last fragment of the old colonnade disappeared, which, I remember, in my
boyhood extended on both sides of the Quadrant from the Circus to Vigo
Street.

Early retirement from management prevented intimacy with several

prominent actors, who otherwise might have been associated with our work.
For instance, Lewis Waller was only once our guest, as things happened. Of