Timbers, Frances - The Magical Adventures of Mary Parish

The Magical Adventures of Mary Parish
MaryParish-Timbers.indb 1 11/20/15 1:24 PM

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Early Modern Studies Series

General Editor
Michael Wolfe
Queens College, CUNY
Editorial Board of Early Modern Studies

Elaine Beilin Raymond A. Mentzer
Framingham State College University of Iowa
Christopher Celenza Robert V. Schnucker

Johns Hopkins University Truman State University, Emeritus
Barbara B. Diefendorf Nicholas Terpstra

Boston University University of Toronto
Paula Findlen Margo Todd

Stanford University University of Pennsylvania
Scott H. Hendrix James Tracy

Princeton Theological Seminary University of Minnesota
Jane Campbell Hutchison Merry Wiesner-Hanks

University of Wisconsin–Madison University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee
Mary B. McKinley
University of Virginia

Copyright © 2016 Truman State University Press, Kirksville, Missouri, 63501
All rights reserved

tsup.truman.edu
No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any format by any means
without written permission from the publisher.
Cover art: Gordon Napier, Alchemy woodcut. Used with permission.
Cover design: Theresa Wheeler
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Timbers, Frances.
The magical adventures of Mary Parish : the occult world of
seventeenth-century London / by Frances Timbers.
pages cm. -- (Early modern studies ; 17)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-61248-143-2 (library binding : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-61248-144-9
(e-book) 1. Parish, Mary Tomson Boucher Lawrence. 2. Wharton, Goodwin, 1653-1704.
3. Women mediums—England—Biography. 4. Spiritualism—England—History—17th
century. 5. Occultism—England—History—17th century. I. Title.
BF1283.P376T56 2016
130.92--dc23
[B]
2015031164
The paper in this publication meets or exceeds the minimum requirements of the Amer-
ican National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed
Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992.

This one is for Estuary, whose unflagging faith in the
“Mary project” helped to magically manifest this book.

Contents
Illustrations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix
Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi
Prologue. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Chapter 1: Down the Rabbit Hole . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Chapter 2: A Cunning Woman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
Chapter 3: The Queen of the Fairies. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
Chapter 4: Finding a Familiar. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
Chapter 5: Matters of Marriage. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
Chapter 6: Sex and Succession . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
Chapter 7: The Pleasures of Venus and
the Pains of Eve. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
Chapter 8: The Traumas of Treasure Hunting . . . . . . . 118
Chapter 9: Heavenly Hosts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136
Chapter 10: Mary’s Crucible . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148
Chapter 11: Plots and Piety. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167
Epilogue: April 1703 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179
Appendix: A Timeline of Mary’s Life. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187
Bibliography. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191
Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205
About the Author. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211

Illustrations
1. The village of Turville, nestled in the Chiltern hills (photo by author).. . . . . 13
2. Seventeenth-century timber-framed cottage in the village of Turville
(photo by author).. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
3. “A Table to Know what Planet Rules any Hour of Day or Night throughout
the Year,” adapted from BL Sloane 3850, fol. 163v. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
4. “Sedan Chair, ca. 1720,” from William Hogarth, The Rake’s Progress
(London: J. Chettwood, 1735), plate IV.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
5. “London, as Rebuilt after the Fire,” from Besant, The History of London, 193. . . 26
6. Parishes of Turville and Wooburn in the Three Hundreds of Chiltern,
Buckinghamshire, from The Victoria History of the County of Buckingham, Vol.
3, ed. W. Page (London: St. Catherine Press, 1925), 32. Accessed via www.
british-history.ac.uk. Image courtesy of Victoria County History, British
History Online, and the Institute of Historical Research.. . . . . . . . . . . . 31
7. Illustration from the trade card of John Keeling of Blackfriars (1670s),
showing his fire engine in use. Inscription reads “These Engins (which
are the best) to quinch great fires, are . . .” with the subtitle “John Keeling
Fecit” [John Keeling made it]. From display in Museum of London, copy
from Pepys Library in Magdalene College, Cambridge.. . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
8. The road from London through Old Brantford and Hounslow to Longford,
from “The Road from London to the city of Bristol,” in John Ogilby,
Britannia. London 1675 (Facsimile reprint, Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis
Terrarum, 1970), Plate #11 between pp. 20 and 21. Image courtesy of
the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto, Rare Book
F-10 00695. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
9. King and Queen of Fairies, from R. S., A description of the king and queene of
fayries (London, 1635). Bodleian Library, University of Oxford,
Shelfmark Arch. A f.83 (3).. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
10. Lud Gate, from a seventeenth-century map of London, originally
started by Wenceslaus Hollar, ca. 1690.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
11. Tyburn Tree, detail from William Hogarth, The Idle ’Prentice Executed at
Tyburn, engraving, 1747, plate 11 of his Industry and Idleness series. . . . . . 62
ix

x Illustrations
12. A plaque at the site of Tyburn (photo by author). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62

13. St. Mary’s Church, Turville (photo by author).. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
14. Stillroom, frontispiece from Hannah Woolley, The Accomplish’d Lady’s Delight
in Preserving, Physick, Beautifying, and Cookery, 4th ed. (London, 1684). Image
courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard University, Hollis number
003910462.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150
15. An Alchemical Laboratory, frontispiece from M. M. Pattison Muir, The Story of
Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1913).
Originally published in Michael Maier’s Tripus Aureus, hoc est, Tres Tractatus
Chymici Selectissimi, nempe (Frankfurt a. M.: Lucas Jennis, 1618). Released by
Project Gutenberg, eBook #14218, November 30, 2004.. . . . . . . . . . . . 151
16. Halley’s Diving Bell, from William Hooper, Rational Recreations . . .
(London, 1774). Wellcome Images.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163
17. Seventeenth-century map of London, originally started by Wenceslaus
Hollar, ca. 1690.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 184–85

Acknowledgments
The greatest debt I owe is to Mary Tomson Boucher Lawrence Parish,
whose story inspired me to push past many obstacles to present her life
to the world. Her determination and creativity are truly inspiring! The
story of Mary’s life presented in the following pages is an outgrowth of
my dissertation work on gender and ceremonial magic at the University of
Toronto, from which I received a great deal of support over the years. I can
never repay the friendship and scholarly input of the “Norns,” in the form
of Barbara Todd and Ariel Beaujot, who invested many hours of their
time in discussion, debate, and beer drinking during the birthing of “the
Mary project.” A very special thanks to my student Calin Wallace for his
insightful analysis of one of the earlier versions of the manuscript. Thanks
to the participants in the workshop held at the Berkshire Conference on
the History of Women in June 2008 for their feedback on my presentation
of Mary’s life as biography. The helpful comments from the two anony-
mous TSUP readers were also much appreciated. I am very grateful for
the academic and financial support from the History Department at Trent
University and CUPE Local 3908-1, during the years of bringing this proj-
ect to fruition. Special mention to Truman State University Press’s Early
Modern Studies series editor Michael Wolfe for his enthusiastic reception
of the original manuscript, and to Barbara Smith-Mandell for her ongoing
support and direction during the publishing process. And much love to my
small but fierce inner circle of family and friends, who never fail to support
me, even when they think I am as crazy as Mary!
Samhain 2015
xi

In order to enter into Mary’s world, the reader may sometimes
need to temporarily suspend disbelief. Mary’s story is akin to
Alice’s journey through the looking glass, in which the real
world is mirrored for both her and us. The following narrative
invites the reader to pass through the looking glass and enter
a liminal world between fantasy and reality, as Mary leads us
through the streets of London and down the rabbit hole.

Prologue
April 18, 1703

The sweet, cinnamon scent of juniper hung in the air. A fire crackled in
the grate against the damp chill of an English spring. Wax candles burned
brightly all around the room, creating a warm glow despite the morose
occasion. Green velvet curtains were tied back at each of the round pillars
of a richly c arved oak bedstead and a fringed valance framed the elaborate
headboard. A silk quilt lay folded at the foot of the bed.1 Several women
and one desolate man stood around the bed gazing on the peaceful face of
the just-deceased woman.
Mary Tomson Boucher Lawrence Parish had outlived her parents,
her uncle, her three husbands, and most of her children, and was estranged
from any remaining blood relatives. For the past week, her female friends
had taken turns holding vigil around her bed. Throughout her illness, her
companions had supported her both physically and spiritually, offering
words of consolation and encouragement while they fussed and chatted.
For the eight days that she had lain in the bed, she had refused any suste-
nance, only drinking a little water when coaxed. A few hours before her
death, an Anglican priest had offered her last communion. She had barely
had the strength to swallow the consecrated bread. Now there was nothing
left to do but quietly escort her life partner, Goodwin Wharton, out of
the room. The weeping man was distraught, but he could be comforted
1. After Goodwin’s death, an inventory was taken of his house on Denmark Street. Mary and Good-
win would have maintained separate bedrooms for the sake of appearances. I like to think that one of
the rooms up two pair of stairs was Mary’s. It contained “One bedstead w’th a Sett of green Cloath
Curtains & Vallance,” as well as pillows and quilts, including two of silk. TNA, PROB 32/46/3,
Inventory of the Goods & Chattells of the Hou’ble Col. Goodwin Wharton . . . dated November 21
and 22, 1704.
3

4 Prologue
to know that Mary had died a “good death,” surrounded by family and
friends, while she graciously surrendered her life to God.
After Goodwin left, the women removed Mary’s nightclothes, un-
folding her body out of the fetal position that she had maintained through-
out her final days. They sponged her body with warm water scented with
sprigs of rosemary to protect against evil and dressed her in a simple shift
of clean linen. When they finished, Mary’s corpse lay in serene state, her
head propped up on feather pillows and her arms crossed over her chest.
After the women finished their duties, Goodwin was allowed to re-
enter the room. The grief for his companion of twenty years was held at
bay only by the fear that the women might have noticed Mary’s condi-
tion as they washed and prepared her body for burial. The nurse, whom
Goodwin had hired to attend her during her illness, reported that the body
was “clean,” meaning that there were no signs of the small pustules that
signaled smallpox. Of course, the woman would not have suspected that
Mary could be pregnant at her age and would not have actively looked for
any evidence to that effect. But what if their child was still alive and had
moved in the womb while the women attended to Mary’s body?
Goodwin pulled back the bed linens and tentatively lifted her shift,
laying his hands tenderly on her abdomen.2 As he palpated her belly, he
could swear that he heard her groan. Was it possible that she was speaking
to him from beyond the grave as she had promised? No, it was just his
imagination, or perhaps it was his longing to hear her voice one more time.
But there was no need to worry. Mary must have starved the child in her
womb so that she could take their secret to the grave. Goodwin believed
that Mary had maintained a fetal position “least the child should come out
& discover us: from which posture I would not let her be moved and so
continued till the boy died in her belly.”3
As Goodwin stared at the body of this woman he loved, he was
reminded of their first meeting. Goodwin had approached Mary in order
to obtain a “play piece,” a lucky charm that would bring him luck in gam-
bling and help him out of his financial straits. Little did he suspect that his
desire for luck at gambling would lead to a lifelong association with this
remarkable woman.
2. Autobiography of Goodwin Wharton, 1:181.

3. Ibid.

Chapter 1
Down the Rabbit Hole

In a Wonderland they lie,
Dreaming as the days go by,
Dreaming as the summers die:
Ever drifting down the stream—

Lingering in the golden gleam—
Life, what is it but a dream?
—Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Goodwin had good reason to consider Mary remarkable, although her con-
temporaries might not have found her as extraordinary as you, no doubt,
will. On many levels, Mary was a typical woman living in seventeenth-
century London: she was married and widowed three times, she gave birth
to many children, and she skillfully employed a variety of strategies to sur-
vive in a harsh, patriarchal world. On one level, Mary’s story illuminates
the early modern ideologies and practices surrounding education, mar-
riage, childbirth, and women’s work. Her narrative also provides insight
on contemporary politics and popular religious beliefs. While Mary lived
with one foot on terra firma, she used her powerful imagination to construct
an alternate world, which granted her the ability to transform not only
her own life, but also the life of Goodwin Wharton. By modern standards,
Mary might be seen as a con artist who attempted to use a member of
the aristocracy for personal gain. But rather than condemning Mary as
a scam artist, consider the more fruitful notion that she was an extremely
resourceful woman who engaged Goodwin in an alternative world that
established new points of reference in both their lives. In order to do so,
5

6 Chapter 1
she drew on contemporary religious and political issues, as well as her past
and present life experiences and emotions. The narrative of Mary’s life
requires a different understanding of truth.
A comprehensive historical biography of Mary would require exten-
sive archival evidence such as legal records, wills, letters, and personal
journals. But like thousands of the middling sort, Mary left few traces of
her life in the archives. Her story is known almost exclusively through the
narrative she told later in her life to her partner, Goodwin Wharton, who
recorded it in a tediously detailed, five-hundred-page journal.1 There is
very little other documentation to verify the details of Goodwin’s journal
or his opinion of Mary’s activities.
During the course of their relationship, Mary and Goodwin co-
constructed the story of Mary’s life. The telling and retelling of various
incidents that occurred both before and after they met reflected both their
past and current concerns. However, the details of Mary’s personal history
are questionable for several reasons. First, Mary was more than fifty years
old when she unraveled her life to Goodwin, making her story subject to
forgetfulness and the fabrication of memory. Secondly, Mary’s version of
events was constructed for Goodwin’s benefit, so only certain aspects of
her life were featured. Thirdly, Mary’s past was filtered by Goodwin; we do
not have Mary’s voice. To further complicate things, Goodwin did not start
his journal until 1685, two years after they met. We don’t always know how
much time elapsed between Mary’s recounting and Goodwin’s recording.
Mary’s story is subject to Goodwin’s misunderstanding and muddling of
details. And Goodwin was not writing for his own personal documenta-
tion. He started the journal for Peregrine, the first surviving son he had
with Mary, “resolving (with God’s assistance to continue so to do) to leave
it you as the greatest and best of the earthly legacies I can bequeath.”2 A
father might elaborate on a mother’s successes and downplay her failures,
but Goodwin tended to be as open about Mary’s shortcomings as he was
about her accomplishments. In addition, the historian ultimately decides
what is important and what should be included or excluded. In any case,
no personal narrative can be taken as complete or unbiased truth. Histori-
1. Although Goodwin starts by writing his autobiography to date, the manuscript continues as a daily
journal. Quotations from his journal (BL Add. MS 20006 and 20007, 2 vols.) are from my own tran-
scriptions and I cite page numbers that were added by Goodwin rather than folio numbers.

Down the Rabbit Hole 7
ans such as Natalie Zemon Davis support the value of the study of narra-
tives, without judgment as to whether they are fact or fiction. Davis argues
that the narratives that a person constructs about her life experiences give
the person’s life meaning.3 In a discussion of cultural history versus social
history, she points out that “all accounts are shaped into stories,” including
the historian’s. For the most part, I am accepting Mary’s account of her
life, as recorded through the lens of Goodwin, as an extension of her mag-
ical activities. Her story was, no doubt, embroidered. But her narrative
provides insight into the social norms, belief systems, and attitudes toward
magic in seventeenth-century England.
The scenarios associated with Mary’s life challenge twenty-first-
century sensibilities because they lie outside the normal parameters of
modern experience. For this reason, Mary has been accused by modern
historians of being an “unscrupulous medium” and “a fraud” who pur-
posely tricked Goodwin.4 But there is no reason to assume that Goodwin
was particularly gullible in accepting Mary’s adventures as truth. After all,
Mary did not fabricate the existence of the spirit realm she explored; it
was integral to early modern culture. The existence of a spirit realm was
generally accepted in a ubiquitously Christian society. Mary was just strug-
gling to understand how it might operate. A society’s beliefs reflect what
the majority accepts as truth, which enables the society’s ideologies. Keep
in mind that the belief in God and angels is still prevalent in the twenty-
first century. Empirical evidence does not come into play in the arena of
belief systems.5
Mary’s life provides an example of the early modern magical
worldview, which included the possibility of interaction with an alter-
native realm of spirits. In the mid-twentieth century, anthropologists
and other scholars challenged previous definitions of magic that were
expressed in relation to religion and science. Based on their studies of
“primitive” cultures, they suggested that magic was a worldview rather
than a practice. They argued that the cultures they studied—which
existed outside of the Western Judeo-Christian world—were connected
3. Davis, Fiction in the Archives, 4, 29, 43.

4. See Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 189, 237, 611; Porter, “Wharton, Goodwin (1653–
1704),” DNB (Dictionary of National Biography). Owen Davies’s opinion of Mary is notable by her absence
from his monograph on English cunning folk: Cunning-Folk.
5. Reynolds, Becoming Criminal, 7–8.

8 Chapter 1
socially and emotionally to a wider spiritual world.6 In the 1970s, histo-

rians started to adopt anthropological methodologies, along with anthro-
pological definitions. Keith Thomas was one of the first to recognize that
early modern culture viewed the world as an expression of spirits and
forces. This “enchanted” worldview accepted the reality of such supernat-
ural phenomena as miracles, witchcraft, and heavenly portents. The world
was supposedly “disenchanted” by the scientific revolution and the age of
enlightenment.7
Part of the magical worldview was a belief in the power of the imag-
ination, which was linked to the power of the will. The concept of the
will was grounded in ancient philosophies that were reinvigorated during
the Renaissance and further developed by Christian Neoplatonists such as
Marsilio Ficino and his student Giovanni Pico della Mirandola.8 To the
early modern mind, the power of the human will was seen as the driving
force of magic. Although the definition of magic is a subject of debate,
it is generally accepted that early modern people understood magic as
the ability to control spiritual and/or supernatural forces to achieve a
predetermined end—good or evil. What separated magic from religion
was that spirits could be coerced and manipulated by humans; God could
not. Control of supernatural forces was, in part, linked to the power of
the imagination. The treatise that became the foundation of Renaissance
Neoplatonism, the Corpus Hermeticum, states, “for imagination is nothing
but begetting,” that is, manifesting.9 Pico echoed this philosophy of the will
to alter reality, “Thou mayest fashion thyself in whatever shape thou shalt
prefer.”10
Connected to the practice of magic was the practice of spiritual
alchemy. Mary practiced the pseudoscientific aspect of alchemy, which was
the transmutation of metals. But from the earliest foundations of alchemy,
6. Wax and Wax, “Magical World View.”

7. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic; Friedman, “Battle of the Frogs and Fairford’s Flies”; Scrib-
ner, “Reformation, Popular Magic, and the ‘Disenchantment of the World.’”
8. Hutton,“Introduction to the Renaissance”; Shapin, Scientific Revolution, 54.
9. The Corpus Hermeticum was predominantly a theological treatise, concerned with the origins and
nature of the divine and man’s path to salvation, rather than a “technical” hermetical guide to magic,
alchemy, or astrology. See Corpus Hermeticum, bk. 5.1, in The Way of Hermes, trans. Salaman, 34.
10. From Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, “Oration on the Dignity of Man,” in Renaissance Philosophy of
Man, ed. Cassirer, 225. For a discussion of early modern imagination in relation to magic, see Timbers,
Magic and Masculinity, 25–31. Eventually, the power of the will became the basis of the modern under-
standing of magic for twentieth-century Wiccan and neo-pagan practitioners: “The art of changing
consciousness at will.” See Starhawk, Spiral Dance, 123.

there had been a philosophical or meditative aspect to the practice, the

goal of which was to gain direct knowledge of God.11 The mythological
symbolism and enigmatic terminology used in alchemical instructions not
only served to cloud the meaning to uninformed readers, but also reflected
the language of religious regeneration. By the seventeenth century, groups
such as the Behmenists and Rosicrucians were interpreting the alchem-
ical instructions for purely spiritual purposes.12 There is no evidence in
Goodwin’s journal that Mary was consciously employing the precepts of
spiritual alchemy, but the results were similar. Mary used living metaphors,
cloaked in the language of angels and fairies, to transmute Goodwin. He
was altered from an inept younger son who quaked before his aristocratic
father to a man who took control over his fate and regained his rightful
place in the sociopolitical world.
When considering the ramifications of both the power of the imagi-
nation and the practice of spiritual alchemy, the historian can benefit from
the insights provided by modern psychoanalysis. Mary used the power of
imagination, both hers and Goodwin’s, to construct a different version of
reality that suggested new resolutions to everyday problems.13 Mary’s skills
of imagination and storytelling promoted self-awareness and contributed
to the meaning of her and Goodwin’s lives.
Mary used her perceptive intuition to destabilize reality and thereby
create new ways of relating to the world, thereby controlling her life and
11. Sheppard, “Alchemy: Origin or Origins?” 37.

12. During the Interregnum, Jacob Boehme’s synthesis of mystical theology and Paracelsian natural
philosophy was embraced by several radical sects; Mendelsohn, “Alchemy and Politics in England
1649–1665,” 34. For a discussion of Behmenism, see Thune, Behmenists and the Philadelphians; Walsh,
Mysticism of Innerworldly Fulfillment; Gibbons, Gender in Mystical and Occult Thought.
13. The founding father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, developed the idea that the artist “moulds
his phantasies into a new kind of reality.” His ideas were further developed by the Polish-born psy-
chiatrist and psychoanalyst Hanna Segal, who maintained that artists’ works were reflective of their
“unconscious phantasies”; Abella, “Contemporary Art and Hanna Segal’s Thinking on Aesthetics,”
166–68. Normally, the artist recognizes a separation between the visual art object, the literary work, or
the performance created, and the self. But as Segal pointed out, the source of artistic creativity is the
shadowy, unconscious area of the mind, which is also the source of delusions; “Delusions and Artistic
Creativity,” 135–39. The artistic fantasies created through imagination can become delusional, if there
is a loss of awareness that the self is engaging in play or performance. As part of a broader discussion
of the role of imagination and creativity in the illness of delusion, Lois Oppenheim, a professor of
modern language and literature, as well as a psychoanalyst, discusses the “relationship of imagination to
the self as agent [italics in original].” Oppenheim maintains that imagination promotes self-awareness
and contributes to the production of meaning in one’s life; Imagination from Fantasy to Delusion, xi–xii, 48,
52, 134–41. This line of thinking is built on the work of the French psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva, who
emphasized the role of the imaginary realm in a person’s construction of self-identity. This resonates
with the ideas concerning the construction of narratives as explored by Natalie Zemon Davis.

10 Chapter 1
possibly changing her circumstances. Facts were irrelevant to the process.

Mary combined aspects of her own personality with elements from her
rich cultural and political environs. The enactment of her alternate world
made the melodrama come to life. Rather than remaining in a private,
mental stage, these manifestations were expressed on a semipublic, social
stage. Mary would ultimately construct an alternative reality by which she
was able to direct Goodwin’s life in a loving and positive way. Mary played
multiple roles in this drama. She was the Uplander who acted as liaison
between Goodwin and the spirit realm, but keep your eyes open for aspects
of Mary reflected in some of the Lowlander characters, as she projects
herself into the spirit realm.
Goodwin’s account of Mary’s narrative can also be viewed as liter-
ature. In the twentieth century, magical realism became a literary genre
that mixes everyday occurrences with the fantastic, using a realist tone
that forces the reader to accept the improbable as unsurprising.14 This
style of presentation is also evident in premodern texts such as Boccaccio’s
Decameron and Cervantes’s Don Quixote. This type of literature explores the
boundaries between the real and the imaginary, as well as other dichoto-
mies, such as mind/body, male/female, and life/death. Generally speak-
ing, this genre is subversive and has the potential to reconstruct a history
that was previously erased or overlooked.15 In the case of Mary’s narrative,
the role of women in the occult world is recovered and the importance
of women in male-dominated politics is highlighted. Her story also sheds
light on the ongoing importance of a magical worldview at the end of
the seventeenth century, in the age of the so-called scientific revolution.
Literary scholar Diane Purkiss encourages historians, particularly feminist
historians, to find “ways to uncover the alterity of woman’s imagination
at work within what might otherwise present themselves as unremittingly
patriarchal discourses.”16 Mary has opened a window into one such world
of female imagination.
Nonetheless, the question remains: Was Mary operating in good
faith with a valued partner or was she purposely leading a client down
a dead-end path? From the very beginning of their relationship, every
undertaking was riddled with minor and major delays. Were the constant
14. Bowers, Magic(al) Realism, 3–4.

15. Zamora and Faris, “Introduction: Daiquiri Birds and Flaubertian Parrot(ie)s,” 2–9.
16. Purkiss, The Witch in History, 53.

impediments bad luck or good management? Were the delays a result of

caution on her part? Was she engaged in a long con before she even knew
who the mark was? It seems likely that Mary’s initial caution was mixed
with desperation, and that she modified her approach as companionship
developed and trust built.
Regardless of Mary’s motives, her interpretation and presentation
of the spirit world provided Goodwin with the encouragement and direc-
tion he needed to take his proper place in society. Her magical world trans-
formed Goodwin’s reality and granted him honor, self-esteem, and, not
least of all, love. By any definition, Mary was a magician par excellence.

Chapter 2
A Cunning Woman
[Mary] knelt down just upon the place where the treasure lay;
and laid her head to the ground and bid the spirit that own’d
the treasure speak to her, which he did, and she made signs
for [Goodwin] to stop a little back, but not so far but that [he]
heard him speak, with a great hollow voice: and by & by [he]
saw her hood pull’d about & she call’d out for help: when
immediately running in, [he] catch’d her up: and after asking
the reason, she said the spirit had told her she could have [the
treasure] no day but of a Monday at 6 o’clock. . . .1
Mary’s magical adventures began long before she met Goodwin Wharton,
and his account of her life demonstrates that whether she was treasure
hunting, discoursing with the spirit world, communing with the fairy realm,
or turning base metals into silver, she did so with energy and imagination.
Mary had humble beginnings in the county of Buckinghamshire, but over
the years, she fashioned herself into a London gentlewoman. Like most
seventeenth-century women, Mary’s life included marriage and mother-
hood. But unlike many of her peers, Mary cultivated a work identity that
was stronger than her identity as a wife and mother. Her skills as a cunning
woman, which she honed from an early age, gave her power to act in a
male-dominated world.
Mary was born in 1630 in the sleepy parish of Turville, which was
isolated from the rest of the county of Buckinghamshire by the grass-

12

A Cunning Woman 13
Figure 1. The village of Turville, nestled in the Chiltern hills (photo by author).
Figure 2. Seventeenth-century timber-framed cottage in the village of Turville (photo by

author).

14 Chapter 2
covered cliffs of the Chiltern escarpment. She described her father, Mr.
Tomson, as “a handsome gentleman, tall and well shaped,” who had trav-
eled to Buckinghamshire from the county of Lincolnshire in the north to
wed Mary’s mother.2 Goodwin’s account often fails to include first names
of people in Mary’s life, but parish records indicate that her mother was
the firstborn daughter of a local farmer, John Cox, and his wife, Mary
Butler.3
When Mary was eight or nine years old, she was sent to live with
her father’s brother, John Tomson, a wealthy bachelor who lived near
Chelmsford, in the county of Essex. Children at this time were commonly
entrusted to a relative, in a sort of apprentice-guardian relationship. Her
parents hoped that Tomson would make Mary his heir, which would have
improved her chances of making a good marriage. The source of John
Tomson’s wealth is unclear, but Mary described him as a sort of cunning
man, who told people “such things as greatly concerned them to know”
and practiced physic (medicine).4 Under his tutelage, Mary’s interest in the
occult was fueled, and the groundwork was laid for her future endeavors
as a cunning woman.
Most of the population used home remedies for their medical needs,
with occasional recourse to cunning folk, sometimes called charmers or
conjurers. These traditional healers were usually male.5 In addition to
healing the sick, they provided a variety of other services, including divi-
nation, love magic, the identification of witches, the discovery of lost and
stolen property, and treasure hunting. Some of their techniques drew on
traditional knowledge concerning herbs and astrology, while others were
more occult. The line between magic and natural philosophy, which was
the forerunner to modern science, was not clear, even to people practicing
or accessing it. However, neither the practitioners nor their clientele viewed
cunning craft as witchcraft or dealing with the devil. Indeed, a good deal of
the art was built on Christian precepts. Nevertheless, many modern readers
would understand the practices more in terms of superstition than religion.
2. Ibid., 1:20.
3. John Cox married Mary Butler April 24, 1583. Mary Parish’s mother was born March 30, 1584.
Her siblings included John, born October 29, 1588; Kathrin, born May 25, 1595; and William, born
July 1, 1599. Turville Parish Records, Buckinghamshire Record Office, Aylesbury.
5. For a discussion of cunning-folk, see Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic; Davies, Cunning-Folk;
Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits.

A Cunning Woman 15
Goodwin gave many examples of Mary’s experiences as a cunning

woman. She treated many people for agues and fevers using a charm that
consisted of a prayer that Jesus had given to his disciples. The passage was
not found in the Bible but was supposedly passed down from person to per-
son for centuries. When the charm was worn or carried, the verse would
cure the afflicted. Faith was a major component of early modern healing.
The incidents Mary described are evidence of her familiarity with
medical knowledge of the day. At a time when modesty was highly valued,
female patients must have been especially grateful for a woman to attend
them. In one case, Mary stepped in after male physicians at Lock Hospital in
Southwark had resolved that a woman’s sore breast was incurable.6 The only
remedy proposed was to cut off the offending part. Instead, Mary offered
a decoction that miraculously drained the corruption from the woman’s
body. She maintained that it was equally effective on old running sores and
on ulcers in the womb, which physicians thought impossible to heal. Some
of her patients were even able to conceive children after such a treatment.
Mary was not unique in employing these types of recipes, which were read-
ily available to literate members of the population through many medical
tracts. Even nonliterate people would have been aware of some treatments
by word of mouth. Paracelsus, the father of modern homeopathy, had pub-
lished his chemical treatments relating to medicine a century before Mary’s
time. By the seventeenth century, his ideas and treatments were widely
known and used. He purportedly “cured a woman that for thirty years had
a canker in her breast, by giving her Essentia Mercurialis, with the water of
Plantain.” For hard abcesses of the breast, he used “the oil of Turpentine
mixed with Mistletoe of the Oak in form of a[n] unguent.”7
Mary also had a concoction that cured convulsions, which was
known as “the falling sickness.” Seizures could be interpreted as a form of
mental illness, epilepsy, or a sign of possession by the devil. For seizures,
as for many other conditions, physicians frequently recommended a com-
bination of vomits, purges, and bleeding, basing their treatment on the
theories of the second-century Greek physician Galen.8 Classical Galenic
6. The Lock Hospital, under the administration of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, took its name from
the loques, or rag bandages, used to wrap the sores of the lepers it once housed. This institution should
not be confused with the London Lock Hospital near Hyde Park Corner, which was built in 1746
purposely to treat venereal disease.
7. Paracelsus, A Hundred and Fouretene Experiments, 4, 9.
8. For a discussion of Galenic medicine, see Temkin, Galenism; Laqueur, Making Sex.

16 Chapter 2
medicine related the four elements of earth, air, fire, and water to four flu-
ids in the human body: blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. These
four humors had physical qualities of cold, heat, dryness, and moisture,
as well as what we might call emotional characteristics. The element of
fire (hot and dry) was associated with yellow bile and a choleric or irrita-
ble disposition. Earth (dry and cold) related to black bile and melancholy.
Water (cold and wet) corresponded to phlegm and a tranquil character.
And air (wet and warm) was associated with blood and a cheerfully opti-
mistic sanguinity. According to this medical system, disease resulted when
the humors were out of balance. Bleeding was especially favored as a
remedy to draw away impurities of the humors and return the body to
equilibrium. Special draughts were also used. The “animal spirit,” which
contributed to the wild nature of convulsions, could also be purified with
a draught of black cherry water mixed with a dram of powdered peony
root.9 Mary told Goodwin about a certain Mr. Oliver who came to see
her about his daughter. The girl was raving mad, foaming at the mouth,
and roaring like an animal. Her swollen abdomen and the violent beating
of her head against the ground were the presumed signs of epilepsy. The
girl’s fits were so violent that she had to be held down to prevent her from
doing injury to herself. Mary managed to force some of her medicinal
formula through the girl’s tightly clenched jaw and gradually she stopped
writhing on the ground and recovered her senses. Cures like this gained
Mary the reputation of a skilled cunning person.
Mary knew that there were various causes for this type of distem-
per: corporal causes from an imbalance of the humors, astral causes from
the influence of the planets, or diabolical causes due to possession by evil
spirits. Medical theories of the day maintained the ancient Greek idea that
when the uterus remained unsatisfied for a long time, it became discon-
tented and angry and wandered through the body, obstructing respiration
and driving women to hysteria, or the “fit of the mother,” as it was called.
A common cure was to insert a fragrant pessary into a girl’s vagina to
attract her womb back to its proper place. One recipe involved a wad of
cotton or wool soaked in a mixture of musk, amber, wood of aloes, ash-
keys, saffron, and hare’s rennet.10
9. Willis, London Practice of Physick, 238–42.

10. The word “hysteria” is derived from the ancient Greek word “hystera,” which was a euphemism
for the lower parts. Unmarried women were particularly prone to infirmities since it was believed

A Cunning Woman 17
In another case that Mary related to Goodwin, a laborer from the

shipyards at Wapping, by the name of Partridge, approached Mary about
his daughter. The young girl had been thrown to the ground by some invis-
ible force and had such strength that several men could not hold her down.
Her parents had taken her to Christ’s Hospital where the doctors assumed
a humoral cause, but they were unable to affect a cure.11 Rather than an
imbalance of the humors, Mary suspected that the girl was suffering from
demonic possession because she also exhibited one of the well-known
indicators—vomiting up pins, nails, frogs, and toads. These particular
indicators of possession had been made well-known in a pamphlet pub-
lished in 1593, The most strange and admirable discoverie of the three witches of
Warboys, which detailed a witchcraft case that took place in 1589 involving
a woman known as Mother Samuel.12 Mary agreed to attend the girl at the
Partridge house. The afflicted child was brought in where many friends
and neighbors had crowded in, anticipating a performance of one sort or
another. They were not disappointed, for as the girl sat in the middle of the
floor, the evil spirit accosted her.
Demoniacs were often treated by banishing the evil spirits. Banish-
ing was a sort of exorcism, which had ceased to be an acceptable practice
in England according to sixteenth-century Anglican doctrine. According
to the Church of England, “Ministers [were] not to appoint publick or
private Fasts or Prophecies, or to exorcise, but by Authority.”13 Protestants
argued that Catholic exorcism was simply a tool for gaining papist adher-
ents. By the seventeenth century, the efficacy of the procedure was still
being debated in the pamphlet literature of the day. Some Protestants con-
tinued to believe in the effectiveness of exorcising demons.14 Mary had
no formal theological training that would have taught her the ritual of
exorcism, but she could draw on her knowledge of banishing spirits from
that the womb was hungry for sexual intercourse. The womb might also emit vapors that could pass
through the arteries to affect the brain. For a contemporary discussion, see Jorden, Brief Discourse . . .
Suffocation of the Mother.
11. Christ’s Hospital, close by St. Paul’s Cathedral, was never a hospital in the modern sense of the
word. During the reign of Henry VIII, the land was granted to the city of London for the relief of the
poor. Inmates were street children, foundlings, vagabonds, the sick, and older men and women who
required charity. The institution included a sick ward for inmates and children whose parents were too
poor to pay for treatment. Maitland, History of London, 662.
12. The pattern had been repeated many times in English witchcraft accusations, including the case of
Anne Gunter. See Sharpe, Bewitching of Anne Gunter.
13. Constitutions and Canons Ecclesiastical, #72.
14. Taylor, Devil Turn’d Casuist; Anon., Boy of Bilson.

18 Chapter 2
the world of magic. She stood quietly at the side of the girl and prayed
fervently for the devil to be cast out: “O thou evil spirit! I command thee
in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost to come out of
her!”15 Mary reported that the spirit visibly emerged from the girl’s body,
which immediately fell limp as a rag. The demon ran up a nearby post
where it sat on a crossbeam spewing a string of blasphemous words at
her and calling her a base woman and a tormentor. Although the demon
threatened to tear her to pieces, Mary stood her ground and commanded
him to be gone. The demon vanished and the parents carried the girl
home to recover.
Moments later, as Mary prepared to leave, the demon almost got his
wish that she be torn to pieces. Several people claimed that she must be a
witch who dealt with the devil herself. Cunning folk rarely got caught up in
witchcraft accusations in England, but there was a fine line between being
considered a respected cunning person and being accused of witchcraft.
The distinction was largely a matter of arbitrary opinion and a cunning
woman could easily find herself on the wrong side of the fence. Anne
Bodenham had operated for many years as a cunning woman and healer,
but in 1653, the eighty-year-old woman was accused and executed as a
witch. Apparently, her work was so impressive that one observer said she
must be “either a witch or a woman of God,” which demonstrates that the
line between the two extremes was not clear cut.16 In this instance, some
of Mary’s acquaintances protected her from the angry crowd and got her
safely away.
One could argue that Mary constructed these narratives based on
folktales and pamphlets that circulated concerning the spirit world. They
speak to the anxieties of the society at the time and the faith it had in
practitioners of this sort. Stories like this often originated from incidents
involving cunning folk such as Mary. They were believable to a seventeenth-
century audience, and most importantly, to Goodwin.
One of the secrets to Mary’s success as a cunning woman was a book
of magic techniques and recipes that she obtained while still a young girl
living with her Uncle John. One day an old German gentleman came for
an extended visit. The man took quite a fancy to Mary. Although she was
not overly fond of the rotund little man, he dogged her day and night while

16. See Bower, Doctor Lamb Revived.

A Cunning Woman 19
she carried out her household duties. Playing on her insatiable inquisi-
tiveness, he began to teach her several recipes for healing, as well as other
curiosities. After much wheedling, he convinced her to run away from her
uncle’s and go secretly with him to Germany, where he promised to teach
her all she wanted to know. (No doubt he planned to increase her carnal
knowledge as well.) The plans were made and the date set. In preparation
for their departure, he entrusted to her care a large, old book. But the night
before they were to leave, Mary had second thoughts about running away,
and she confessed the whole scheme to Uncle John. He surreptitiously sent
her to her father’s house in Turville early the next morning. When she did
not show up at the appointed meeting place, the old German returned to
Uncle John’s and pretended that nothing was amiss. But by the third day,
he could not stand it any longer, and he inquired as to the whereabouts of
Mistress Mary. Her uncle then revealed that he knew about the clandestine
plan. The gentleman was forced to quietly pack himself off to Germany
to save what dignity he had left. Mary supposed that he did not dare tell
her uncle that she still had his precious grimoire. Even as a young girl, Mary
understood how valuable the volume was, and she cleverly wrapped it up
in her clothes before she fled to Turville. She never did reveal her secret to
her uncle.
The old man’s book proved very useful. A grimoire was originally a
handwritten manuscript that gave instructions for various types of magical
operations. Volumes of this sort had been in circulation in the monas-
tic and university communities throughout the Middle Ages.17 Magi-
cal instructions were usually written in Latin, with an occasional recipe
inserted in English, French, or Hebrew. However, the overall increase in
printing, which blossomed from the mid-fifteenth century onward, made
occult information more widely disseminated. Several printed volumes
on the occult were readily available in English. The secrecy surrounding
ritual magic makes it impossible to know how many volumes existed or
how easily accessible they were. Innumerable treatises on astrology existed,
especially as a result of the loss of control of the printing of almanacs
and popular literature by the Company of Stationers during the Interreg-
num.18 As grimoires were circulated and copied, each magician compiled
his own unique and eclectic collection of magical instructions, including
17. Davies, Grimoires.

18. Tomlin, Divinity for All Persuasions, 38.

20 Chapter 2
fragments of published texts. Material from authoritative authors was sup-

plemented with charms and spells, instructions for making talismans and
amulets, and medical recipes. Astrological correspondences were usually
scattered throughout.
Mary probably pored over the intricate illustrations of magic cir-
cles, drawn with red ink with esoteric symbols around their perimeters.
Although she could read, she would not have been able to read the Latin
instructions. After Mary was widowed from her first husband, she actively
pursued the cunning craft. She had the means at that time to have selected
passages translated for her by a scholar who was temporarily down on his
luck. She sat by his side while he wrote, taking the book away with her for
safekeeping at the end of each session. For a crown a day plus food and
drink, he eventually deciphered more than a third of the book.19
One set of instructions taught Mary how to gather fern seed, which
had magical properties associated with the king of Fayrie. According to
legend, an angel foretold that John the Baptist would be born “at that very
instant, in which the Ferneseede, at other times invisible, did fall.”20 Mary
told Goodwin that at midnight one Midsummer’s Eve (the only day of the
year that the seed blows), she cast a magic circle around the fern to collect
the tiny seeds, which were no larger than fleas, while the devil, appearing
as a man in black, roared outside the protective circle.
In addition to practicing physic, Mary fashioned gambling charms.
Gambling—or gaming, as it was called in the seventeenth century—was
a very widespread pastime among men and women from all social levels.
In addition to playing cards, throwing dice, spinning roulette, tossing coins
(known as hat farthing), shooting billiards, and buying lottery tickets, peo-
ple bet on cockfighting, dogfighting, bull- and bearbaiting, horse racing,
and bowling. At the highest level of society, the monarch employed an
official in the royal household, the groom-porter, whose duties included
furnishing the king’s lodging with cards and dice and arbitrating disputes
among players. Elite men and women could play games in the groom-
porter’s lodgings at Whitehall as well as in the privy chamber. Lower-status
gamblers played in gaming houses, common taverns, or wherever it was
19. A crown was worth five shillings. A shilling was equal to twelve pence. There were sixty-two shil-
lings in a sterling pound.
20. Jackson, Treatise Containing the Originall of Vnbeliefe, Misbeliefe, or Misperswasions, 178–79. For the many
magical beliefs concerning ferns, see May, “Economic Uses and Associated Folklore of Ferns and Fern
Allies.”

A Cunning Woman 21
convenient. The area around Covent Garden was particularly popular for
gaming in London.21 Sons of aristocrats who were waiting to inherit estates
and surviving on a meager allowance from their fathers were particularly
prone to such pastimes.
In an age of financial instability, there was great demand for a tal-
isman that players could carry to help them win at the gaming table. In
seventeenth-century terms, a talisman was an image or figure that was
made under certain constellations. The word could also refer to the mag-
ical characters inscribed on an object carried or worn as a charm.22 The
preparation of a talisman required astrological knowledge concerning
which stars and planets ruled which earthly elements. The study of the
heavens was part of natural philosophy, and the belief that the heavenly
realm was organically linked to the earthly world via correspondences
supported the efficacy of the talisman. Classical doctrines concerning the
relationship between the macrocosm and the microcosm had been rein-
vigorated during the Renaissance revival of Greek philosophy. According
to Renaissance magic, adepts could channel divine power into material
objects by manipulating the properties of the natural world.23 Therefore,
the construction of an effective talisman was considered a respected art,
not witchcraft or scamming.
Mary’s skill in cunning craft had continued to grow from the time
she started her practice as a young widow until she met Goodwin some
thirty years later. Her prowess in making gambling charms was how she
met Goodwin Wharton in February of 1683. At the time Goodwin met
Mary, she was living in a “sorry little lodging in a poor beggarly alley &
a very ill house” close to Long Acre.24 Long Acre was a broad street that
served as the main east-west road through Covent Garden, running from
the northeast at Drury Lane to the southwest at St. Martin’s Lane. It was
home to tradesmen and others of means, but the many narrow, blind
alleys that ran off of the street were packed with ramshackle, two-room
cottages.25 The area was full of brothels, and according to Goodwin, many
21. Anon., Whole Art and Mystery of Modern Gaming, 104–5; Ashton, History of Gambling in England, 43–48;
Tosney, “Gaming in England, c.1540–1760”; Bailey and Hentschell, Masculinity and the Metropolis of
Vice, 1550–1650; Tosney, “Playing Card Trade in Early Modern England,” 637–56.
22. Blount, Glossographia, s.v. “talismans.”
23. Timbers, Magic and Masculinity, 18–22.
25. Stow, Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster, 649; Thornbury, Old and New London, 238–55.

22 Chapter 2
whores frequented the tavern that occupied the ground floor below Mary’s
miserable room.26 Ned Ward, a satirist who reported on the conditions
of London’s underworld, described a typical tavern: “The Ceiling [was]
Beautified, like a Soldiers Garret, or a Counter Chamber, with Smutty Names
and Bawdy Shadows, Sketch’d by unskilful hands with Candle-flame and
Charcoal.”27 In what Goodwin described as “scurvy” surroundings, men
smoked pipes and played at cards, while women of less than reputable
character awaited opportunities to make a few pence through sex or steal-
ing.28
When a slight young man approached Mary, dressed in “an old
greatcoat” with a wide-brimmed hat pulled down low to hide his face, she
wondered what he had to hide or, more likely, if he “had a mind to screw
something out of her.” She had had her fill of this “sort of quack or poor
projector,” who tried to take advantage of her good nature. Little did she
know that Goodwin was equally uncomfortable, given the “meanness of
the place” and the “ill looks of all” he saw in the tavern. As the inter-
view progressed, the awkwardness was intensified, because Goodwin “did
not immediately give faith to all [he] heard.”29 He occasionally expressed
doubts concerning Mary’s previous accomplishments. But as it turned out,
they shared many interests in common. Goodwin was also quite knowl-
edgeable in physic and astrology and had experimented with alchemical
trials.
After much discourse, Mary agreed to furnish her mystery client with
a talisman, or lucky charm, to win at gambling. Goodwin had attempted
several means in the past, including “taking a mole in a mercurial hour.”30
The German magician Agrippa suggested that if a person swallowed the
heart of a mole while it was still palpitating, the person would be able
to foretell the future.31 But this grisly method of divination had proven
futile. Mary suggested the more pleasant means of harvesting a particular
variety of periwinkle. The plant grew nearby in gardens on the south and
west side of the Earl of Leicester’s house. The front courtyard was occu-
pied with shops and taverns, but local parishioners gathered herbs from

27. Ward, London Spy, 3.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid.
31. Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy, 69.

A Cunning Woman 23
Figure 3. “A Table to Know what Planet Rules any Hour of Day or Night throughout the
Year,” adapted from BL Sloane 3850, fol. 163v.
Leicester Fields. According to astrological correspondences, the trailing

vine was ruled by the planet Venus, so it was best harvested at one o’clock
in the afternoon on a Friday.32 So the next Friday, Mary braved the English
winter weather to gather some of the waxy leaves for her new client.
At that point, Mary had not been out of her lodging in weeks. In
addition to financial misfortunes, she had recently suffered a broken leg.33
Even a simple broken bone was a serious matter in the seventeenth cen-
tury; complications could lead to death. Fractured bones were normally
treated by a chirurgeon or barber surgeon rather than a physician. These
men, and occasionally women, were not university-trained physicians.34
32. The seven days of the week are ruled by the seven planets from which they take their names. Friday
(Vendredi in French, die Veneris in Latin) is ruled by Venus; Lilly, Christian Astrology, 482. In turn, the planet
that rules the day is the ruler of the first hour of each day.
34. Occasionally, widows of barber surgeons were licensed to perform surgery, but more often women
practiced without a license, sometimes combining their skills with midwifery. For more information

24 Chapter 2
More often, they got firsthand experience by traveling with an army where
they treated wounds, set fractures, and performed amputations. The bar-
ber surgeon was both more accessible and more affordable to the general
public than a physician, who seldom dealt with hands-on medical mat-
ters. Nonetheless, they still expected payment. In Mary’s case, the surgeon
refused to touch her until she paid him. Her destitute state forced her to
send a neighbor out to pawn her cloak.
When relating the incident to Goodwin, Mary did not elaborate
on how the barber surgeon treated her leg, but the customary treatment
of a simple fracture was to set it in place and then wrap it three or four
times with a piece of soft linen cloth that had been dipped into raw egg
whites to stiffen it. To strengthen the binding, another cloth was applied
on top. This “cerecloth” was dipped in wax that had been melted in
oil of roses.35 After the wax solidified, the wrapping acted like a plaster
cast. Movement was further restricted by a series of splints individually
wrapped in wool and placed all around the leg, about the breadth of
one finger apart. After two weeks, these splints were removed, which
allowed the patient to hobble around with just a soft wrapping on the
leg.36
This had not been Mary’s first experience with a broken leg. A few
years earlier, she had slipped in the frost going down a steep hill and her leg
“broke in short in two.” The ride home in a hackney coach over the pot-
holed streets of London had “put all the bones & slivers into such great dis-
order as cannot be imagin’d.”37 On that occasion, Mary could not rise for
a full ten weeks after the surgeon swathed the bones. Even then she should
not have attempted it, but the man was so confident of his workmanship
that he insisted she put weight on the leg. No sooner had she set her foot on
the ground than the leg snapped like a twig beneath her. The same surgeon
set it again, but he did a terrible job. After another period of recuperation,
Mary realized that her leg was not set straight but was bowed like the hull
of a ship. Since at that time she had the financial means to remedy the
situation, she sought out a blind man at Lambeth whose reputation in such
on female physicians and surgeons, see Evenden, Popular Medicine in Seventeenth-Century England, 55–56.
35. “Oyl of Roses is not only used by it self to coole any hot Swellings or Inflamations, and to bind and
stay Fluxes of Humors unto Sores, but is also put into Oyntments and Plaisters that are cooling and
binding”; Culpeper, English physitian (1652), 206.
36. The technique outlined here is taken from Moulton, Compleat Bone-Setter, 6–11.

A Cunning Woman 25
Figure 4. “Sedan Chair, ca. 1720,” from William Hogarth, The Rake’s Progress (London: J.
Chettwood, 1735), plate IV.
matters was renowned. She could not easily climb in and out of a carriage,
so she hired one of the many sedan chairs that carried affluent citizens
through the muddy streets of London. Through the glass-paned windows
of the litter, she watched the two burly chairmen adroitly maneuver the
chair through the narrow streets. They safely delivered her to one of the
several public landing stages on the bank of the Thames, from where she
could travel to Lambeth.
The gray waters of the tidal river acted as a freeway in premodern
London. In addition to merchant ships and private vessels, hundreds of
wherries shuttled passengers up, down, and across the bustling river. For as
little as eight pence, Mary could be transported from Blackfriars upriver
to Lambeth, on the south side of the Thames. The watermen would have
had to manhandle Mary across the overhanging bow of the vessel, which
was designed to allow more mobile passengers to board without stepping

26 Chapter 2
Figure 5. “London, as Rebuilt after the Fire,” from Besant, The History of London, 193.
in the muddy riverbank. In addition to silt, the banks were commonly

strewn with garbage from the outgoing tide, creating a stench of refuse
in varying stages of decomposition. With Mary perched uncomfortably
under the tilt, the long, narrow water taxi would have pushed out into the
crowded waterway. On the south shore, she would have been deposited at
the stairs adjacent to Lambeth Palace.38
In the barber surgeon’s cottage, a “great kettle of oats” was boiling
over an open fire. For nearly three hours, Mary waited apprehensively,
listening to the crackling of the flames and the soft bubbling of the oat-
meal. At last, the chirurgeon laid bags filled with the freshly boiled oats all
around her leg from top to bottom. For the next two hours, “she roar’d &
cry’d” as steaming bags replaced the cooled ones. When all the bags were
finally removed, her leg was “as soft as a pap.”39 The man deftly set the
bones in order with his clever fingers and then swathed the leg tightly once
again. This ordeal was a high price to pay for vanity, especially when long
skirts concealed a woman’s legs from public view. But Mary was construct-
ing herself as a gentlewoman, and physical blemishes were associated with
lower social status.
Mary offered many anecdotes like these to Goodwin over the years.
Some of her stories contributed to Goodwin’s opinion of her as a strong-
willed woman who had overcome many obstacles in her life. And some
contributed to constructing an image of a competent and successful cun-
ning woman. Others explained why she had fallen to the low social and
financial position she was in at the time she met Goodwin.
38. “Thames Watermen.”


A Cunning Woman 27
Returning to February 1683—Mary hobbled on her second broken

leg to the gardens at Leicester House. When she reached the spot where
the small, violet periwinkle flowers usually grew, she discovered that the
whole plant had been recently pulled up. She would have to wait until the
next Friday to try a different location. The only other place she knew of
was in a garden near Old Street, north of the city walls, which was almost
two miles from Long Acre. But Mary’s leg was still not strong enough to
walk that far. When Goodwin offered to go himself, Mary objected on the
grounds that there were particular words of prayer that must be said while
gathering the plant. Goodwin asked what the words were; Mary refused to
tell him. When Goodwin argued that she ought to tell him since she had
promised to obtain the periwinkle for him, Mary told him to go to hell and
stormed away. This was Goodwin’s first lesson in her high temperament
(and, regrettably, would not be his last). But after a few days, Mary’s anger
melted and the pair made their peace. So on the third Friday, Goodwin
went to the garden near Old Street armed with the appropriate prayer. But
to his frustration, he could not find the spot by the directions Mary had
given him. Finally, by the following Friday, the day after Goodwin’s thirti-
eth birthday (he was born 8 March 1653), Mary’s leg was feeling stronger
and she resolved to go with him to Old Street. Together they harvested the
periwinkle. However, Goodwin’s elation was soon destroyed when he (yet
again) lost at the gaming table. When he confronted Mary with his recent
losses, she protested that she had given the leaf to several others who had
great success at gaming, naming particular people whom he knew. Good-
win had little choice but to accept the temporary setback, and the pair
explored other options.
Mary had successfully made six or seven more complicated play
pieces in the past. Using the porous internal shell of the cuttlefish as
a mold, precious metals were cast at a particular astrological time and
inscribed with astrological characters. She told Goodwin that the person
needed only to carry the special game piece in his pocket, and he would
infallibly win at whatever game he chose. Mary told him she had owned
one herself, but had managed it very poorly. She won so fast at the gaming
tables that she raised suspicions and had been prohibited from attending.
In the end, she lost the talisman. Goodwin “got a cuttle shell according
to her direction” and obtained “clean gold and silver.” He followed her
instructions, but he did not have the necessary experience in working with
metals, so he was unsuccessful. Mary could not assist him because he was

28 Chapter 2
using someone else’s laboratory, and “she could not have been with [him]
in so public a place.”40
Mary was determined not to lose her new client because of these
setbacks. She recalled that a former client, Henry Glover, a gentleman
who had lived solely by his gambling skills, had died from a rapier wound
during a duel with James Lashley a few months earlier.41 She hoped that the
charm she had made for Glover was still in the possession of Mrs. Wall, the
woman Glover was to have married. Within a few days, Mary tracked her
down, but Mrs. Wall informed her that she had given the talisman to Mr.
Glover’s serving man as a reward for his employment, thinking it no more
than a trinket. Further investigation revealed that the servant had subse-
quently pawned the piece, valuing it only for its gold and silver content.
Mrs. Wall agreed to get it out of pawn, but she said she would not part with
the thing unless she knew what its true value was. When Mary explained
its power, Mrs. Wall said, “Say you so! I don’t believe that. Come, do you
take it and I’ll play with you.” But when Mary played, she lost every game.
“Now,” said Mrs. Wall, “let me have it and try if I can win.”42 Which she
did. But Mrs. Wall was suspicious of how the charm worked, fearing it
might be empowered by the devil, and happily parted with it.
Mary confidently presented the play piece to her new client and
instructed him not to remove it from its silk wrapping for nine days. But
when the time was up and Goodwin used it, he again lost his money. After
all these delays, he was very discontented with his results and demanded
an explanation. Then Mary remembered that the charm had originally
been consecrated by a priest upon the altar, and she realized that it was
only good for the person for whom it had been specifically blessed. She
concluded that it worked for Mrs. Wall because the woman was to have
married Mr. Glover and become one flesh. In order for it to work for
Goodwin, the piece needed to be reconsecrated for his use. However, it
was increasingly difficult to find a Catholic priest in London in light of
the anti-papist sentiment of the 1680s, when Charles II’s court was iden-
tified with Catholicism.43 It was even more difficult to find a priest who
was willing to dabble in magic. In the past, Mary had employed a priest

41. Middlesex County Records (Old Series), Vol. 4, 1667–89, ed. Jeafferson, 188.
43. Miller, After the Civil Wars, 121.

A Cunning Woman 29
from the Catholic chapel of the Spanish ambassador, who leased part of
the thirty-three-room London mansion known as Weld House, situated on
present-day Wild Street just west of Lincoln’s Inn Fields.44 In the eyes of
Protestants, Catholic priests were often considered conjurers because of
the controversy surrounding transubstantiation. Indeed, it had been Cath-
olic monks who had kept ritual magic alive throughout the Middle Ages
by copying magic manuals and experimenting with the spirit realm. The
intertwining of magic and popery continued to be a common notion.
After these initial setbacks, Mary decided that if she was going to
go to any more trouble, she wanted to know her mystery client’s name.
Goodwin had continued to conceal his identity from Mary for the first few
weeks of their relationship as he did not want to be seen in the seedy part
of the city where she lived. She was very pleased to discover that the young
gentleman was Goodwin Wharton, son of Philip, fourth Baron Wharton.
The Wharton estate of Wooburn Manor was just six miles from Mary’s
childhood home in Turville. Wooburn Manor had been part of the baron’s
marriage settlement when he moved to Buckinghamshire from the north
to wed Goodwin’s mother, Lady Jane Goodwin.45 Not only was Mary well
aware of the Wharton family as local aristocracy, but also Philip was par-
ticularly prominent in the county because of his controversial political life.
He had been one of the more radical Protestants who had supported the
puritan Oliver Cromwell against King Charles I during the civil wars in the
1640s. Although Wharton had favored the parliamentarian faction during
the civil war, he was alarmed at the extent of religious nonconformity
that developed following the death of Charles I. After Cromwell’s death,
Philip Wharton supported the Restoration monarchy of Charles II; how-
ever, he continued to support the anti-Anglican faction of Parliament.46
44. The chapel was destined to be gutted in 1688 by a London mob fired up about James II’s Cathol-
icism. Cunningham, Handbook for London, s.v. “Wild House,” 554.
45. Jane Goodwin (1618–58) was the only daughter and heir of Colonel Arthur Goodwin and his wife
Jane, daughter of Richard Wenman, Viscount Wenman of Tuam; Joan A. Dils “Goodwin, Arthur (d.
1643), politician,” in DNB.
46. Philip Wharton (1613–96) was the son of Sir Thomas Wharton of Easby, Yorkshire, and his wife
Philadelphia, daughter of Robert Carey, first Earl of Monmouth. Since his father died before Philip
reached manhood, the title of baron was passed down from his grandfather. At the tender age of
twelve years old, he inherited vast estates in Westmorland, Cumberland, and Yorkshire in the north.
His first marriage, to Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Rowland Wandesford of Pickhill, Yorkshire, was child-
less. In 1637 he married his second wife, Lady Jane. They had three surviving sons (Thomas, Goodwin,
and Henry) and four daughters (Anne, Margaret, Mary, and Philadelphia). For more information on
Wharton’s political intrigues, see Jones, Saw-Pit Wharton.

30 Chapter 2
Goodwin’s father was a well-known political actor and aristocrat, which

meant that Goodwin was a highly visible member of society, even though
he was a second son. The elder Wharton’s religious and political opinions
meant that Goodwin was well versed in nonconformist religious doctrine,
which was outside the views of the orthodox Church of England, as well
as the Roman Catholic one. Goodwin’s beliefs would later be challenged
by Mary’s religious views, which were colored by Catholic influences. So
not only were Mary and Goodwin separated by social status, but they also
came from opposite ends of the religious spectrum. Despite these differ-
ences, they were united in their common interest in magic.
By the time Mary met Goodwin, she was fifty-three years old and
an independent, experienced woman, but she was also in financial trou-
ble. At first glance, Goodwin—himself desperate for magical help—might
have appeared to be an easy mark, but if Mary had any designs on the
Wharton riches, her hopes would soon have been destroyed. Goodwin
explained that his father’s large estate did him little good as the second and
least favorite son. “Gooding,” as he was known to his family, had always
been overshadowed by his elder brother, Tom. The boys should have
had a close relationship: They were tutored at home and then traveled
to France together to complete their schooling. But the young Gooding
could not compete for attention with the extroverted Tom, who remained
his father’s favorite despite his reputation as a notorious rake. He was
well known for racing horses, chasing women, gambling, brawling, and
dueling. Lord Wharton’s favoritism was evident in his handling of the
Wooburn estate, which his wife had brought to the marriage. Goodwin’s
mother, Lady Jane, had instructed her husband to bequeath Wooburn
House to her second-born son, reasoning that her elder son did not need
the additional estate, but it would provide well for their second son.47 The
baron did not honor his dead wife’s wishes; he gave the estate to Tom.
When push came to shove, Goodwin was pressured into yielding to his
father’s wishes and signing away his claim to the property in exchange for
a promise of a meager and inadequate income of two hundred pounds a
47. Wooburn Manor had been granted to William Lord Compton by Henry VIII. During the reign
of Elizabeth I, Compton granted the lands to Robert Spencer and Robert Atkinson. It came into the
possession of the Goodwin family via the marriage of Anne, daughter of Sir William Spencer, to Sir
John Goodwin. Part of the original manor, known as Bishops Wooburn, was included by Sir Francis
Goodwin in the marriage settlement of his son Arthur in 1618. This subsequently became part of the
marriage contract between Philip Wharton and Jane Goodwin.

A Cunning Woman 31
Figure 6. Parishes of Turville and Wooburn in the Three Hundreds of Chiltern, Bucking-
hamshire, from The Victoria History of the County of Buckingham, Vol. 3, ed. W. Page (London:
St. Catherine Press, 1925), 32. Accessed via www.british-history.ac.uk. Image courtesy of
Victoria County History, British History Online, and the Institute of Historical Research.
year. For Goodwin, it was a no-win situation, as his initial reluctance and
bitter complaints about his treatment were viewed as filial defiance. By
the time he met Mary, Goodwin’s relationship with his father was such
that he had to periodically appease his father in order to secure the prom-
ised allowance.
Lord Wharton’s attitude toward his eldest son was not uncommon
among the elite. Primogeniture dictated that the eldest surviving son inher-
ited the title and the family estate. Like many younger sons, Goodwin was
forced to find alternate sources of income. Many young men in the same

32 Chapter 2
position went to university to prepare for a legal or ecclesiastical career.

Goodwin fancied himself something of an inventor and hoped his projects
would eventually afford him some income. His most promising endeavor
had been a partnership in acquiring the rights to a new design for a fire
engine in 1676, but Goodwin’s attempts to get a patent for the machine
were contested and the whole business came to nothing.48
Goodwin lamented that he was caught in a vicious cycle of elite
poverty. His purse was almost always empty and his credit was in ruins,
which meant he had very little standing in aristocratic society. By his own
admission, he was weighed down by a burdensome and tedious life from
which he could see no immediate escape. Like many of the seventeenth-
century elite, he was facing downward mobility. His luck at gambling was
as miserable as his fortune in other adventures, and he was constantly at
risk of being apprehended on the street for his debts. At the time he met
Mary, Goodwin was subletting a room at the Middle Temple, one of the
four Inns of Court in London. Originally, the Inns of Court were dormi-
tories for law students and practicing barristers, but by the end of the sev-
enteenth century, they had been transformed into convenient lodgings for
country gentlemen who came to London for business and pleasure. These
gentlemen frequently sublet their rooms when they were not in residence.49
Living at the Middle Temple at least maintained Goodwin’s façade of
being a respectable country gentleman.
Goodwin’s story stirred Mary’s empathy, since she had experienced
similar misfortunes. Goodwin reported that “(God inclin[ed] her heart to
it) more freely to me than in all her life time she had ever done to any person
whatsoever before.” She was “willing to trust [him] in every thing whatever
and make [him] master of all [she] have, desiring nothing for [her] self
when [he was] rich but to live quietly & serve God, being now almost dis-
tracted with [her] troubles.”50 Regardless of Goodwin’s poor financial cir-
cumstances, Mary had more to gain than lose from his friendship, since she
had hit rock bottom herself. A partnership between them seemed to hold a
world of promises for both parties. However, there was one small problem:
like most London residents, Mary rented her lodgings, which were in an
48. A fourteen-year patent was granted to Goodwin Wharton and Bernard Strode “at the nomination”
of (i.e., with the support of) the designer, Theodore Lattenhower, for a fire engine with leather pipes;
Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, Charles II, [vol. 18], 1676–1677, 145, entry #796, June 5, 1676.
49. Lemmings, Gentlemen and Barristers, 32, 42; Orlin, “Temporary Lives in London Lodgings,” 229.

A Cunning Woman 33
Figure 7. Illustration from the trade card of John Keeling of Blackfriars (1670s), showing
his fire engine in use. Inscription reads “These Engins, (which are the best) to quinch great
Fires, are . . .” with the subtitle “John Keeling Fecit” [John Keeling made it]. From display in
Museum of London, copy from Pepys Library in Magdalene College, Cambridge.
undesirable part of the suburbs, outside the walls of the city. Influenced by
the lower sort who frequented her neighborhood, she had developed the
custom of drinking brandy with them. As a result, she had missed several
appointments with Goodwin. He did not appreciate having to wait two or
three hours for her. Even when he found her at home, they were constantly
interrupted by one or another of her friends popping their heads into her
room unannounced. So at the beginning of April 1683, Goodwin paid off
Mary’s landlady and moved her few belongings to a house in Shire Lane,
just south of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. She was not only removed from her cro-
nies, but she was also more convenient to Goodwin’s lodgings at the Mid-
dle Temple. He could have her more to himself, and she could turn over a
new leaf. Both parties were very optimistic about their future.

Chapter 3
The Queen of the Fairies

In April 1683, a little more than a month into their magical partnership,
Mary and Goodwin were at an impasse. The gambling charm Mary made
for Goodwin didn’t work, and they could not find a priest to reconsecrate
the charm she had made for Mr. Glover so it would work for Goodwin. But
Mary was not easily defeated. She revealed to Goodwin another potential
source of riches—Mary had previous contact with the fairy realm.
Mary told Goodwin that she had firsthand experience of the fairy
realm. One evening at dusk when she was not yet eight years old, she “saw
a great many of them altogether, & looked a great while, mightily pleased
upon them.” She called to her family, but “as soon as ever they came they
were all vanished, though they heard the music first as well as she.” After
that, Mary often went to the fairy rings in the hills nearby to try to see
them. She danced and called to the fairies to come out and join her, but
they never appeared. Nonetheless, Goodwin interpreted this as a sign that
from an early age “God had placed something in her or intended her for
something not common to others.”1
The belief in fairies as part of the larger spirit world was very prev-
alent in the seventeenth century.2 Toward the end of the century, there
may have even been a resurgence of fairy beliefs in the name of scientific
inquiry. Leading men of the day—including some involved with the Royal
Society, the flagship of the scientific revolution—actively pursued inquiry
into the supernatural, thus perpetuating the belief in the fairy realm. For

2. For a general discussion on early modern fairy beliefs, see Latham, Elizabethan Fairies; Briggs, Anatomy
of Puck; Purkiss, At the Bottom of the Garden.
34

The Queen of the Fairies 35
the most part, those who wrote about fairies were recording the popular
beliefs of the time. A great deal of ambivalence existed concerning the
nature of fairies both in popular culture and in learned discourse. Descrip-
tions of fairies in printed literature reflect this ambiguity. In a discussion
concerning second sight, part of which was published as Miscellanies in
1696, the antiquarian and Royal Society member John Aubrey wrote that
he was not certain whether fairies were demons or ghostlike spirits.3 The
seventeenth- century nonconformist minister Richard Baxter acknowl-
edged the possibility that fairies were intermediary beings that resided
halfway between heaven and hell: “We are not fully certain whether these
Aerial Regions have not a third sort of Wights, that are neither Angels,
(Good or Fallen,) nor Souls of Men, but such as have been there placed as
Fishes in the Sea, and Men on Earth: And whether those called Fairies and
Goblins are not such.”4 He did not say whether “wights” were considered
demonic.
In The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), the scholar Robert Burton
expressed that he felt more strongly that fairies were terrestrial devils (com-
monly seen by old women and children) that danced on the heath and
lived under the hills.5 Other authors believed that such beings could be
profitable for mankind. The astrologer William Lilly stated that “Those
glorious Creatures, if well commanded, and well observed, do teach the
Master anything he desires . . . [they] love the Southern Side of Hills,
Mountains, Groves.—Neatness and Cleanliness in Apparel, a strict Diet,
an upright Life, fervent Prayers unto God.”6 James VI of Scotland (later
James I of England) also noted that some people believed that the Scottish
fairies called “brownies” were benevolent spirits that took “turnes vp and
down the house,” helping with the housework. However, in his treatise on
witchcraft, he opined they were really evil spirits.7
As the concern with witchcraft grew in the sixteenth century, the
authorities who recorded witchcraft accounts often included fairies in the
demonic realm. Goodwin’s conception of fairies had come from reading
“part of Paracelsus,” who depicted them as “almost a sort of devil.”8 The
3. Aubrey, Miscellanies, 76, 156.

4. Baxter, Certainty of the Worlds of Spirits, 4.
5. Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, 65.
6. Lilly, Mr. Lilly’s History of His Life and Times, 103.
7. James VI, Daemonologie, 65.

36 Chapter 3
Swiss Renaissance physician Paracelsus described several types of ele-

mental spirits commonly considered under the umbrella term of fairies.
Sylphs lived in high places like mountaintops and traveled on the wind;
although composed of air, they could appear in human form and live for
hundreds of years. Pygmies or gnomes were earthly elementals that lived
below the surface of the earth where they guarded hidden treasure; these
beings loved to deceive humans and could be dangerous. And elves and
brownies lived in communities in the forest.9 This communal aspect of
the fairy realm was also expressed by the Gaelic scholar and Episcopalian
minister Robert Kirk, who described fairies as “subterranean inhabitants”
who lived in houses, dressed like humans, and had humanlike disputes.
Mary’s presentation of the fairy kingdom was reminiscent of Kirk’s por-
trayal, particularly in reference to their disputes. Mary would not have
been familiar with Kirk’s work because it was not published until the nine-
teenth century, but Kirk composed The Secret Commonwealth at the end of
the seventeenth century, so it reflects the common folklore of the time.10
Some of the tales that Mary told Goodwin reflect the ideas circulating in
oral culture. She related the story about “one wench [who] was taken by
them & because she would not dance with them was taken up into the air
& let fall in a pond.”11
Mary’s childhood method of calling the fairies was common to
women, who tended to invite spirits to appear rather than commanding
them to do so.12 According to the beliefs of the time, there were several
methods available for communicating with fairies. Male magicians usually
used formal invocations. One set of instructions advised the magician to
soak a crystal in the blood of a white hen and bury specially prepared
hazel sticks in a place that fairies haunt, then invoke the fairies at an astro-
logically propitious time. Any spirit that appeared would be bound to the
crystal so it would be at the magician’s beck and call. Once so bound, the
fairy was obligated to satisfy all the magician’s commands, without deceit,
9. Paracelsus’s ideas were originally published in “Liber de nymphis . . .” in Philosophia Magna (1567).
Goodwin could have read the English version translated by Robert Turner; Paracelsus, Of the Supreme
mysteries of Nature, 51–59.
10. Kirk was responding to an inquiry by Bishop Edward Stillingfleet, a seventh son who also had seven
sons, concerning the belief that the seventh son of a seventh son was prone to having the sight. Kirk,
Secret Commonwealth, ed. Lang, 5.
12. For a more in-depth discussion of the gendered differences of magic, see Timbers, Magic and
Masculinity.

or face everlasting damnation.13 A less formal method to have conference

with a fairy was to stand under an elder tree and say “Magram Magrano”
three times. If the summoner was lucky, a yellow flower would spring from
the ground and a fair woman would appear, and she would grant the magi-
cian’s every wish.14 But sometimes fairies simply appeared to a person,
unexpectedly and of their own volition, as they did in Mary’s case.
After Mary’s brief encounter with the fairies as a child, she never
saw them again until she was estranged from her third husband. Sometime
in the 1670s, a poor woman from the village of Longford, sixteen miles
west of London, asked Mary to visit her house to deal with some spirits
that were disturbing her. Mary entreated her landlord, Mr. Blow, as well as
a couple of men she could trust, to accompany her to the woman’s home.
The first leg of the journey was on a well-traveled and relatively safe road,
since it was one of six routes used by the English post office. It was not
safe, however, for anyone, let alone a woman, to ride alone through the
barren heaths of Hounslow, which had a notorious reputation for being
plagued by highwaymen. The rotting corpses of criminals, hanging on
gibbets along the way, served as a grisly reminder of the dangers of the
open road.15
Like many women of the middling sort, Mary was an accomplished
rider, and at that time in her life, she had her own horse. On this occa-
sion, however, she rode double with Mr. Blow. Some women, even elite
women, rode astride like a man, but since Mary was constructing herself
as a gentlewoman, she probably sat sideways on a pillion tied behind the
saddle. Riding double was a common practice among all levels of society.16
The party would have followed the Strand past St. James’s Park and out
to Knightsbridge. The straight but narrow road had originally been built
by the Romans to access coal from Bristol and to travel to Bath to take the
comfort of the hot spring waters. A little beyond the town of Old Brant-
ford, where the road met the northern bank of the Thames, the riders
would have ridden through open, uncultivated land. Beyond the village of
Hounslow, the town of Longford spread out along both sides of the road
for half a mile.
13. Bod. Ashmole 1406, fols. 50–53.

14. BL Sloane 3851, fol. 129.
15. History of the County of Middlesex, 3:96.
16. Edwards, Horse and Man in Early Modern England, 76–77.

38 Chapter 3
Figure 8. The road from

London through Old Brant-
ford and Hounslow to
Longford, from “The Road
from London to the city of
Bristol,” in John Ogilby, Bri-
tannia. London 1675 (Fac-
simile reprint, Amsterdam:
Theatrum Orbis Terrarum,
1970), Plate #11 between
pp. 20 and 21. Image cour-
tesy of the Thomas Fisher
Rare Book Library, Univer-
sity of Toronto, Rare Book
F-10 00695.

At the house in Longford, Mary quickly determined that the spirits

troubling the woman were guarding a small treasure consisting of some
money and a couple of silver cups. Her traveling companions immedi-
ately started the return trip, but Mary’s departure was delayed. For some
unstated reason, she wanted to take a coach back to London, but the reg-
ular coaches were full for the next two days. The old woman entreated her
to pass the time by walking abroad with her to see King John’s “castle,”
a thatched manor house that the current king used as a hunting lodge.17
King John had reportedly stayed there on his way to sign the Magna Carta
in 1215, so the house was considered a historic landmark. The house was
situated a few hundred yards from the River Colne. Mary’s hostess sug-
gested that while they were in the area, they should visit a place nearby on
the third heath of Hounslow, which the locals considered fairy ground.18
They walked out onto the heath, but Mary could not discern any evidence
of the fairy rings she knew so well in Turville. Since it was commonly
believed that fairies lived underground in hills, she stamped two or three
times and called for the fairies to come out. But none materialized.
The day after visiting the fairy site at Hounslow Heath, Mary finally
returned to London. A few nights later, she felt something lie down at her
back, and a soft voice mumbled something in her ear. She was filled with
fear because she had experienced this sort of thing before. Years earlier,
Mary had been acquainted with a Mrs. Nurse, who told people’s fortunes.
One day Mary had a falling out with the woman, who threatened to tear
her to pieces. Mrs. Nurse said, “Madam, I’ll send the devil to you!”—a
threat that could be interpreted as a witch’s curse. Mary got out of the
woman’s company as quickly as possible, and assumed that her rude
humor was due to drunkenness. But the next morning, in the shadowy
light of first dawn, Mary heard something in her chamber “go patt patt,
like a cat” walking across the floor.19 Before she could sit up in bed to see
what it was, she felt something jump up and lie upon her chest. The weight
was so heavy that she could not stir a hand or foot, and she was scarcely
able to breathe. She prayed to God to deliver her. With all her strength,
17. The manor house now known as King John’s Palace is situated on Park Street, Colnbrook. Clas-
sified as a Grade II historical building by the Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for
England, it was built circa 1600, presumably on the site of the original hunting lodge; Robbins, New
Survey of England: Middlesex, 169.
18. Autobiography of Goodwin Wharton, 1:50–51.
19. Ibid. 1:37.

40 Chapter 3
she managed to extricate her right arm from the bedclothes and lay a
hand on the strange burden. Although the weight on her chest was almost
unbearable, what she lifted up was as light as a feather. She could not see
it clearly, but it felt about the size of a cat and was as soft as goose down.
By this point, her panic had turned to rage. She was just about to hurl the
creature across the room when, to her amazement, it spoke to her in a
scratchy imitation of Mrs. Nurse’s voice: “If thou throwest me down upon
the ground Mary, I will pull thy hand off.” Shocked by this turn of events,
Mary gently lowered her arm and deposited the strange beast on the floor.
Once she was fully awake, she began to suspect the source of the appari-
tion. She quickly dressed and ran the short distance to Mrs. Nurse’s house.
Rather than denying any part of it, the woman said, “Why, did I not tell
you I would send the devil to you? I was but as good as my word.”20 Mary
bid her, at the utmost peril, to take care about coming near her again. After
that, Mary was not troubled by the woman and she had no more night
visitors. In the end, Mrs. Nurse became a miserable, debauched drunk and
next door to an idiot. She was thrown in prison where, Mary heard, the
devil abandoned her.
Victims of witchcraft frequently described the nightmare experi-
ence of a heavy weight on the chest.21 The sensation was variously inter-
preted as the presence of the devil, a witch’s familiar, or the shape-shifted
witch herself.22 In the premodern period, a nightmare was not simply an
unpleasant dream. The “mare,” or demon of the night, was believed to
be a female spirit or nocturnal animal that could suffocate a person in her
or his sleep.23 A modern person might interpret the images seen in such a
state as a dream that occurred in the altered state between deep sleep and
full waking. But the seventeenth-century world was populated with super-
natural beings and people did not require a psychoanalytical explanation.24
Mary’s anecdote highlighted the difference between herself, as a respected
cunning woman, and Mrs. Nurse, a suspected witch. In this case, Nurse
20. Ibid., 1:38.

21. Francis Bacon (1561–1625) maintained that the nightmare dream of a weight on the stomach
was caused by indigestion rather than any supernatural cause; Weidhorn, Dreams in Seventeenth-Century
English Literature, 34.
22. On the witch’s familiar, see chapter 4.
23. See OED, s.v. “nightmare.” On dreams in general, see Weidhorn, Dreams in Seventeenth-Century En-
glish Literature, 16–19.
24. Bynum takes this approach in her discussion of religious women who experienced visions; Holy
Feast and Holy Fast, 8.

was not accused or put on trial for witchcraft, but Mary’s story confirmed
the dangers of dealing with the devil. Mary’s inability to control the witch
firmly situated her on the opposite side of evil. From Goodwin’s point of
view, her story emphasized her separation from the world of demons.
So when Mary returned from Longford and felt this presence at her
back in the night, she lay in such a fright that she could not understand
the low, gentle voice that spoke to her. The following evening, just in case
the presence returned, she left a candle burning in her chamber. Nothing
unusual happened for the next two nights, but on the third, she heard soft
footsteps in the room, although she could not see anyone. Then a delicate
little creature, not more than a yard tall, materialized from the shadows
and moments later, the handsome, well-dressed woman hopped up and
seated herself on the edge of the bed. “Mrs. Parish,” she said softly, “I
come to tell you that you must not lie idly here, but that you must get up
and prepare yourself, for there is a design against your life or happiness by
the Prince.”25 Mary was uncertain which was more startling: the message
or the messenger. She set aside the mysterious content of the message for
the moment and concentrated on the ethereal messenger. Mary thanked
her for her kindness. Before the creature could dissipate into thin air like
the fairies of her childhood, Mary quickly reached out and caught the
woman’s small hand in both of her larger ones. Mary was surprised to
discover that she was grasping flesh and bone that felt as real as her own.
But she did not wish to hold the woman against her will, so she allowed
the dainty hand to be drawn back. Blushing, the woman told her not to be
afraid. She told Mary that others like herself would come soon, especially
the visitor’s father, who would give her good counsel. And she told Mary
that the queen of the fairies wanted her to come to court the next day at
the place the old woman in Longford had shown her. Then she took her
leave and faded from sight.
The next morning, Mary slipped away to the stable as early as
she could. She had the wits to stop along the way and bring along Mr.
Stretwell, a tapster from a neighboring tavern, a simple man she could
trust to be discreet. They rode hard the whole way to Hounslow Heath.
When she came within a short distance of the place, she dismounted and
instructed her companion to wait for her. As she walked across the heather-

42 Chapter 3
covered meadow, she heard the delicate ringing of bells. Her senses were
enveloped by beautiful music that seemed to be coming from a knoll. She
surveyed the knoll, but no one was in sight. Then she noticed a golden
plate filled with sweetmeats, a golden spoon and fork, and a bottle of wine
with a glass goblet. A disembodied voice welcomed her and invited her to
eat and drink. Mary did not want to insult her invisible hosts, but she had
heard that eating fairy food could cause her to be suspended in the fairy
realm. She excused herself as politely as possible, and the mysterious voice
told her to return the next day, when she would be able to see the fairies
and go among them. They also told her to take the golden plate and uten-
sils as a gift.
Two days later she repeated the journey. Once again, she left her
horse and her traveling companion some distance away. As she approached
the place, she could see a sort of little door in the side of the hill. The voice
bid her enter and she did without any hesitation. Once she stepped through
the doorway, she was immediately in the company of two or three dimin-
utive creatures similar to the woman who had visited her chamber. They
led her down a path that seemed to be always going downhill and con-
stantly in a round. In a short time, they came to level ground and entered
a stately palace, more beautiful than Whitehall or Somerset House. The
creatures led Mary through a number of courtyards, many paved with
marble. After passing through several great rooms, they entered a most
splendid chamber where two little persons sat at dinner under a canopy.
The couple invited her to sit at another little table that was set close by
and laden with food, but again Mary had little appetite for the food of
this enchanted place. While the couple ate and drank, they spoke with her
and asked her many questions. They urged her not to be afraid of them or
what they offered her, explaining that they were a people who also served
God and did not mean her any harm. After they talked for more than half
an hour, the king and queen (for that is who they were) presented her with
presents of delicately wrought rings and jewels. When Mary thanked them
for it, they replied “Thank not us, thank God.”26 The same little creatures
led her back through the palace and up the winding path to the heath. This
portion of Mary’s fairy narrative is very reminiscent of James VI’s com-
mentary on the superstitions concerning fairies. He explained how people
26. Ibid., 1:52.

claimed that they had been “transported with the Phairie to such a hill,
which opening, they went in” and saw “a King and Queene of Phairie, of
such a iolly court & train.”27
A couple of evenings later, as Mary lay in her bed in London, the
little king and queen appeared in her chamber with half a score of atten-
dants. They walked around the room and tried to persuade her not to fear
them. They told her to visit them at Hounslow whenever she wished. All
she needed to do was to call at the place, and she would be let in. Almost
every night after that she had visitors: sometimes the king and queen
together with their retinue and sometimes just one of them. Most of the
company looked very young, scarcely over the age of twenty years. One
little old gentleman, who appeared to be above sixty years of age, was the
father of the young creature who had first appeared to Mary. They called
him Father Fryar. He was dressed somewhat like a Catholic friar in a cowl
and a rough-spun woollen tunic tied at the waist with a rope belt. What
distinguished him from a regular friar was a hat with a great brim, which
flopped over his face and hid his eyes. It is tempting to think that Mary’s
description of the fairy realm was influenced by a woodcut that appeared
on the cover of a pamphlet published before she was born, in which a
tonsured monk follows a regally dressed couple. Even if Mary never saw
the image, it reflects a conception of the fairy realm that circulated in the
early modern period.
These creatures, which humans commonly called fairies, referred to
themselves as Lowlanders and referred to people like Mary as Uplanders.
Mary did not know what to make of all this. She was not easily persuaded
to set aside her fears. She thought it might be a sin to eat and drink with
them. What if they were some form of demons? But Mary soon discov-
ered that the Lowlanders were a very religious people, practicing a form
of Christianity similar to Roman Catholicism. They had their own pope,
who resided in England, thereby conveniently avoiding the political issues
associated with a foreign papacy. (Henry VIII would have approved.) But
having descended from the Jews, they differed from the papists in that they
also strictly observed Judaic practices dating back to the time of Moses.
They even circumcised their male babies. Mary was not the first person
to associate fairies with Catholicism. James VI of Scotland had noted

44 Chapter 3
Figure 9. King and Queen of Fairies, from R. S., A description of the king and queene of fayries
(London, 1635). Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Shelfmark Arch. A f.83 (3).
that fairies first “appeared in time of Papistrie and blindnesse.”28 In his

poem “The Fairie Temple” (ca. 1626–38), Robert Herrick portrayed the
fairies employing “mumbling Masse-priests” and using the paraphernalia
of the Roman Catholic church, including beads, bells, fumigations, and
28. Ibid., 65.

indulgences.29 Following the Reformation, magic and Catholicism were

frequently linked as the Church of England struggled to eliminate both
popery and what they considered superstition among its parishioners.30
Mary’s construction of a Catholic fairy realm probably represented
her desire for the old religion. She told Goodwin that, although her father
was a Protestant, she had been raised as a Catholic by her mother. Perhaps
her mother educated her at home about the traditional ways or perhaps
the local school was operated by Catholic families. Mary may have learned
to read and write by studying the Catholic catechisms. Mary had attended
a primary school in the village of Watlington, five miles west of Turville
in the bordering county of Oxfordshire. This was probably the closest
school to Turville; not every parish supported a school and education was
not a national or even a parochial institution. Girls were not admitted to
grammar schools where young boys studied Latin and classical literature
to prepare for university. But some girls, usually between the ages of six
and nine years old, attended privately operated elementary schools where
they learned to read and possibly write, skills that were taught separately.31
Despite the Protestant position of the Tudor and Stuart monarchies, the
Roman Catholic religion had openly survived in England. Catholics were
tolerated as long as they paid the required fines for recusing themselves
from attendance at Anglican Church services.
In the isolation of the Chiltern Hills, there were several prominent
Catholic families, including the Stonor family. The Stonors were staunchly
Catholic and paid heavy recusancy fines.32 In 1632, William Stonor built a
large house in the parklands of Christmas Commons, on the edge of the
village of Watlington where Mary went to school. The family may have
had an interest in education born out of a religious agenda. Although it
was many years after Mary attended school, William Stonor’s third-born
son, Thomas, built and sponsored a boy’s grammar school upstairs in the
new town hall.33 Regardless of where Mary obtained her information, she
29. Herrick, Poetical Works, ed. Martin, 90–93.

30. Purkiss, At the Bottom of the Garden, 105–6.
31. Jewell, Education in Early Modern England, 11–12, 92–93.
32. Recusants were citizens who refused to attend services of the Church of England. According to the
Elizabethan Act against Popish Recusants of 1592, recusants had to pay heavy fines for the privilege
of continuing their Catholic faith. For an overview of Catholicism in early modern England, see Bossy,
English Catholic Community, 1570–1850; Haigh, “From Monopoly to Minority.”
33. History of the County of Oxford, 8:213; Christine Carpenter, “Stonor [Stonore] family (per.
c.1315–c.1500), gentry,” DNB.

46 Chapter 3
was certainly knowledgeable about Catholic practices. She incorporated

Catholic theology and ritual into her interpretation of the fairy realm.
The Lowlanders often invited Mary to stay the night at their court,
but she always politely declined, still worried they might turn out to be
some sort of evil creatures. Her distrust was not altogether unjustified.
One night when the king, along with a train of followers, was visiting her
in her chamber, he said, “Madam, I understand you have been a woman
that hath bore many children; I, for my part, have nought by my wife but
if you will let me lie with you, and I have a child by you, I would make
you the greatest woman in England.”34 The king’s proposition bears an
interesting resemblance to the behavior of King Charles II, who had no
children by his queen but acknowledged twelve bastards by seven different
mistresses.35 Mary was outraged at the king’s brazen suggestion, but before
she could cry out and wake the household, the king assured her that he
would not force her to do anything against her will, then quickly took his
leave.
After Mary’s refusal to bear a child for the king, he grew more
reserved with her and seldom visited her in her chamber. The queen,
however, often came twice a week, and Mary continued to make visits to
Hounslow. Mary’s association with the Lowlanders continued for several
years and she seldom left their kingdom without some present of money
or jewels. This would be her downfall. She grew so confident of their gen-
erosity that she began to brag. When anyone asked her how she managed
to live so high, she flippantly replied that “she could but make a journey
to the fairies and she could have what she would.”36 Father Fryar chas-
tised her on more than one occasion about this indiscretion, but she fool-
ishly took no heed. Worse yet, she continued to take along company to
Hounslow, sometimes inviting three or four men. Her party rode so often
through Brantford that she was the subject of public speculation. She often
stopped at inns on the way back and talked brazenly about her adventures.
This behavior earned her the title of conjurer, which infuriated her. The
people of the parish of Hounslow were so alarmed by her constant visits
that they cut down a great old tree that grew near the entry to the fairy

35. Charles II’s queen, Catherine of Braganza, did not have any surviving children, but his several mis-
tresses produced at least twelve bastards. The most famous was the son of Lucy Walter, whom Charles
appointed to the peerage as the Duke of Monmouth.

realm, which had served as a landmark in the middle of the common. But
still she persisted. When she finally became aware of public opinion, she
started to avoid the road through Brantford and took the road through
Acton, just before reaching Hammersmith.
Although Mary had offended most of the fairy court with her indis-
cretions, the queen still favored her. But then there came a time when none
of the Lowlanders visited her for several days. This was rare, so she rode
out to see why. When she arrived at the place, there was no longer any
visible entrance. She called and knocked and stamped, but no matter what
she did, there was not the least response. The next day, she tried again but
again she got no satisfaction. When the third day yielded no better results,
she gave up, concluding that she had been banished from the fairy realm.
She later learned the reason: the queen had died and the king, who was
angry with Mary, forbade anyone to visit her or admit her to the court.
And so Mary lost the great privilege of being a guest of the Lowlanders.
After hearing Mary’s account of her experiences with the fairy
realm, Goodwin was eager to renew contact with the Lowlanders. Mary
employed the services of her friend George (about whom we will learn
much more presently) to renegotiate her friendship. It turned out that since
Mary’s banishment eight or nine years earlier, the king had married a new
queen, Penelope La Gard, who was sister to the Lowlander king of Por-
tugal. (Perhaps coincidentally, the English queen at the time, Charles II’s
consort Catherine of Braganza, was sister to the Uplander King Afonso
VI of Portugal.) Penelope was an intelligent and understanding woman,
who was admired not only in her own kingdom but throughout the world
of the Lowlanders. The king both loved her for her exceptional beauty and
respected her for her wisdom. As he had grown old and somewhat doting
(and had never been considered the best head of state anyway), he will-
ingly left the management of the realm to her, while he pursued his love
of hunting and other diversions. Queen Penelope cheerfully embraced
the proposition of renewing contact with Mary. So after almost a decade,
Mary was reconciled with the Lowlanders. Father Fryar was the first to
come to her chamber. He was elated to revive their friendship and caught
her up on all the gossip of the court.
Father Fryar told Mary that the king and queen had resolved to
visit Goodwin at night in his chamber at the Middle Temple. He bid
her tell Goodwin not to be afraid of them. Mary instructed Goodwin
to buy new candlesticks with pure wax candles and to place fresh herbs

48 Chapter 3
and flowers in the room in anticipation of their arrival. Goodwin dressed

himself meticulously for the occasion. He sat patiently in a chair “having
4 candles burning all the night, and a good charcoal fire, & [his] bible to
read in” and “past the night sometimes also praying to God to prosper
[him] in [his] design.”37 But no one came. In the morning, Mary learned
that the queen had suddenly taken sick, but she and the king planned to
come the next night. Goodwin repeated the performance the next night,
but again, no one came. In the morning, he again went to Mary’s lodging
to learn what had happened. This time he learned that it was the king
who had suddenly taken ill and frightened all the court. But they assured
him that they would come in a couple of days when the king had rested
and recovered. Later in the day, the queen sent word that she did not want
Goodwin to wear himself out by sitting up all night but rather he should
wait for them in the comfort of his bed. She also said that she was mightily
disappointed by not yet meeting him and had taken an oath that she would
be the first of her people that he would see: an oath that was to cause many
complications in the future.
So the third appointed night came and, according to the queen’s
request, Goodwin sat up in bed with only a candle for reading. He
remained awake, anticipating the fairies’ arrival, until the clock struck one,
two, three, and then four in the morning. Finally, against his will, he fell
into a sound sleep. When he awoke at the crack of dawn, he rushed to
Mary’s lodging to inquire why he had had no visitors. Mary told him that
the king and queen, accompanied by a royal entourage, had indeed been
at his chamber at five o’clock, but that he was so blissfully asleep that they
thought it a shame to wake him.
Since their initial plan to visit Goodwin in his chamber seemed
doomed to failure, the king and queen invited Mary and Goodwin to
visit them on April 23 at their annual St. George’s Day festivities. St.
George had been the patron saint of England since the Crusades of the
thirteenth century, but celebrations in his honor had gradually gone out
of fashion after the Reformation, as Protestants discouraged the vener-
ation of saints.38 The Lowlanders, however, followed Catholic traditions
and still came out to celebrate the saint’s day on the heath, riding their
37. Ibid., 1:71.

38. St. George’s cross was used on the English flag since the sixteenth century. Hutton, Stations of the
Sun, 214–17; McClendon, “A Moveable Feast.”

small, delicate horses, no bigger than mastiff dogs. Again, Mary’s descrip-
tion echoes James VI’s description of the fairies, who “naturallie rode and
went, eate and drank, and did all other actiones like naturall men and
women.”39
While Goodwin was being deterred from meeting the queen, Mary
was getting reacquainted with the Lowlanders. She had many discussions
with Father Fryar and his daughter, a talkative little creature who prat-
tled on about life at court. Mary took these opportunities of private con-
versation to learn the answers to her many questions about the fairies.
One day when Father Fryar was with her in her chamber, she wanted to
get something off a high shelf that she could not reach without a chair.
Although Father Fryar did not appear to be more than four feet high,
he easily reached the shelf without rising from the ground. Lady Fryar
explained that they could be bigger when they willed, which explained
why fairies were commonly described as small creatures yet were believed
to have intercourse with humans.
The other problem that vexed Mary was how they were able to
materialize out of thin air in a locked room and disappear again as easily.
She learned that they used an herb called moonwort, which could open
even a locked door without the least noise when touched on any iron in the
doorframe. Contemporary herbalist Nicholas Culpeper agreed that the
herb could open locks and even unshoe horses. Indeed, there was a legend
that the herb had been used to pull thirty horseshoes from horses of the
parliamentarian troops of Robert Devereux, third Earl of Essex, during
his campaign near Tiverton, Devonshire, during the civil war.40
The fairies’ invisibility was another matter. Mary learned that they
used a certain pea that was specially grown and prepared; when a per-
son held the pea in the mouth, it rendered the person invisible. Acquiring
such a pea became Mary and Goodwin’s next project. With great trouble,
and not less physical pain, Goodwin managed to catch three “black bone
catt[s].” He carried the wretched beasts in two “bootes tyed down” to the

40. Moonwort (Botrychium lunaria) is a small fern that favors the tall grass of heaths in April and May.
One dark green, thick leaf puts forth a small, slender stalk four or five inches high, which has leaves re-
sembling half-moons. Another stalk rises above this branch, which is covered with seeds. In accordance
with the doctrine of correspondences, moonwort is ruled by the moon. Culpeper, English Physician
Enlarged (1725), 218–19.

50 Chapter 3
place where he used (or rather abused) them.41 A few days later, Mary man-
aged to also obtain a hedgehog, which she maintained was equally effec-
tive. At the appropriate astrological time, they killed the animals, removed
the hearts, and inserted a pea into each heart. The fresh hearts were then
planted when the moon was waxing. Mary’s instructions to Goodwin were
very similar to a recipe on how “to be invisible” that appeared in a grimoire
from the period.
Take a black cat and kill her in March, and take out the heart
of her and cut it and set a bean in the midst of it and set it in
the ground in March, the Moon increasing, and the said bean
will grow and become five pods and in time they will be ripe,
then gather them and shell them and put them in the mouth
one by one, and when thou hast the [correct] bean thou shalt
not see thy face in the glass and then thou art invisible.42
The peas that were planted in the cats’ hearts did not come up, but the
pea from the hedgehog’s heart, which was planted in another place, came
up and flourished. By November, three or four peas were ready to harvest.
But when Goodwin placed the peas one at a time in his mouth, nothing
happened. At that point, Mary remembered that the peas had to be con-
secrated, which was the same problem they had with the gambling charm.
Before Goodwin could engage a priest to consecrate the peas, the
queen of the Lowlanders suggested that Father Fryar perform the ceremony.
Like most of their projects, there were inevitable delays. The priest did not
come to perform the necessary ritual until almost a year later, in August
1684. To prepare for the occasion, Goodwin spread a table with a clean
cloth and placed a folded linen napkin on it. Father Fryar laid the pea on
the far side of the napkin and came every day to perform certain prayers.
Each day the pea moved a short distance across the napkin, leaving a dent in
the cloth that, Goodwin reported, remained for months until the linen was
washed. Unfortunately, just when the pea had almost reached the opposite
edge of the napkin and dropped off, which would denote completion of
the process, Father Fryar fell ill and died at the ripe old age of more than
1,700 years. Lowlanders live much longer than Uplanders, and Father Fryar
was the world’s oldest Lowlander at the time of his death. In the years that

42. BL Add. MS 36674, fols. 104–8.

followed, further attempts were made to bring the pea to perfection, but
eventually Goodwin discovered that his efforts were pointless. The queen
had put a curse on the pea so that it would not work until he had seen her.
Cultivating the pea of invisibility was one of many projects Mary
and Goodwin engaged in while waiting for their appointment with the
king and queen on St. George’s Day. On April 23, at five o’clock in the
morning, Mary and Goodwin were informed that the queen had fallen
sick again and the celebrations were canceled. The queen assured them,
through a messenger, that she would be well enough by May Day, which
they also kept as a holy day, and she asked them to be patient for another
eight days. So on May 1, 1683, Goodwin, anticipating that he would finally
meet the queen of the Lowlanders, decided to splurge. Taking what little
funds he had on hand, he hired “a coach & four horses” to carry them
to the town of Hounslow in style.43 But their plans were foiled yet again.
Apparently, the queen had fallen “ill,” meaning that she was menstruat-
ing. Lowlander women, following the custom of Mosaic Law that women
be “put apart seven days” during their monthly flow (Lev. 15:19 KJV),
were confined while they bled, plus an additional eight days thereafter for
purification. During that time, the queen was attended by her ladies-in-
waiting, but she was not allowed to be in the presence of any man, even the
king or the pope. This delay was disheartening, but Mary took a proactive
approach. She sent Goodwin to the physic garden at Westminster to fetch
some stinking arrach (Vulvaria).44 Also known as stinking motherwort, this
plant was recommended by the seventeenth-century herbalist Nicholas
Culpeper as an excellent medicine for female ailments, since it was under
the influence of Venus.45 When Goodwin returned with the plant, Mary
bruised the dusky, round leaves in a mortar and pestle and infused them in
Frontignac, a strong, muscat-style white wine. The next day she sent this
potion via Lady Fryar to the queen, with the hopes that it would shorten
her time of confinement.
Meanwhile, the meeting was rescheduled for Holy Thursday, which
fell on May 17.46 But when the day came and Mary and Goodwin were

44. John Evelyn records visiting a medical garden at Westminster that was under the care of Edward
Morgan, a botanist; Diary, ed. de Beer, 3:217. In 1676, the Society of Apothecaries started moving
plants from the Westminster site to the Chelsea physic garden, which is still in operation.
45. Culpeper, English Physician Enlarged (1725), 18.
46. To the modern reader, this seems to be too late for Easter, but in 1683 England was still on

52 Chapter 3
again preparing to leave for Hounslow, they learned that the king and
queen had fallen out to such a degree that the gates to the kingdom were
closed. The king had drunk a little too much the night before (as was fre-
quently his custom) and made a fuss about Goodwin being admitted to
the court. The queen insisted that it was a matter of conscience to keep
their promise. They disputed all night until the queen was at risk of falling
ill from her passion. Finally, when the king’s head cleared of the wine, he
became quiet as a mouse, yielding as usual to the queen’s higher wisdom
in these matters. But they needed time to mend the rift between them after
such strong words had been thrown about during their argument.
By the end of May, the queen arranged to ride out with the court
to meet Mary and Goodwin at Brantford, which was four miles from the
Lowlanders’ gateway on Hounslow Heath. Since Goodwin’s funds were
running low, he and Mary decided to travel by water rather than coach
this time. They hired one of the light and swift wherries to row them up
the Thames to the landing at Old Brantford. As they refreshed themselves
at a tavern, they received news that the queen had thought better of their
original plan. The Lowlanders were traveling with a large company of
horses and passing through the town of Hounslow would draw a great
deal of attention. Therefore, she suggested that Mary and Goodwin meet
them on the first heath. After making some inquiries, they discovered a
gentleman’s coach that was going in their direction. On the way, the coach
was pelted with heavy rains, and by the time they reached the town of
Hounslow, night was closing in. Their meeting could not take place until
the next morning.
The rain continued vehemently all through the night and flooded
the flats on the third heath, where the Lowlanders accessed their realm.
The terrain dipped into a bit of a hollow where a stream ran through,
and the rains had swelled the brook until it overflowed the heath. The
Lowlanders could not open the door without the water rushing in upon
them. Floods commonly blocked the roads in the area once or twice a year,
but it was hard luck for Mary and Goodwin that the heath should flood at
that particular moment. It continued to rain all day and into the next, so
the Julian calendar. Because of miscalculations in the ancient Roman calendar, the date for Easter
had gradually gotten out of sync with spring equinox, on which it is based. The Gregorian calendar,
based on the mathematical models of Nicholas Copernicus, was implemented by a papal bull in 1582,
but only a handful of Catholic countries adopted the new calendar. Protestant countries ignored the
reform for many years. England did not switch to the Gregorian calendar until September of 1752.

there was not much hope of the flood abating. On Saturday morning, with
ceaseless rain still obscuring the horizon, Mary and Goodwin resolved to
return to London.
***
Goodwin’s acceptance of these constant excuses and delays is a testament

to his faith in Mary and his belief in the spirit world. His desperate finan-
cial situation, no doubt, fueled his desire to continue his attempts to meet
the queen of the fairies. But what was Mary thinking during this time?
If we accept that the fairy realm was a construction or manifestation on
Mary’s part—whether consciously or not—what does it tell us about her
perceptions of her world? Queen Penelope managed the kingdom of the
Lowlanders, which could be interpreted as a challenge to patriarchy. But
Queen Elizabeth I had ruled England by herself (that is, without a consort)
in the not-so-distant past. Perhaps Mary related to the image of a strong
female ruler. After all, she was in complete control of the negotiations
between Goodwin and the fairy queen. Other aspects of the fairy realm
reflect the limited amount of power that a woman could have in the seven-
teenth century: confinement during menstruation speaks to issues of male
power over females. Is Mary inadvertently commenting on the ambiguous
position of women in the Uplander realm? As the driving force behind
the co-constructed narrative, Mary reveals her own deepest desires and
fears as she faces life’s daily challenges. In the following chapters, we will
see how events in the fairy realm mirrored contemporary historical events
and echoed Mary’s personal life history. As in a fairy tale, Goodwin was
the hero of the story. In typical folklore tradition, he entered into a quest
to meet the queen of the fairies for personal gain and glory. As we shall
discover, his quest became a journey of self-discovery.
***
In addition to the disappointment of not meeting the queen, Goodwin

barely had enough money to settle their account at the inn in Hounslow, a
reflection of his serious financial straits. By the time he and Mary reached
London, he was in a very bad state of mind, not knowing how they were
to continue on a daily basis, let alone pursue meeting the queen. His credit

54 Chapter 3
was so bad that he could no longer borrow money from either friends
or family. Out of desperation, Goodwin was forced to pawn some of his
clothes to buy the daily necessities and give the couple a little pocket money
until one of their projects came to fruition. Movable goods were often used
as a sort of safety net against hard times. Clothing was a common pawn
item, because textiles were highly valued and secondhand clothes were
an important part of the English economy. By the end of the seventeenth
century, there were many pawnbrokers on the streets of London, especially
outside the city walls along Houndsditch.47 Resource to pawning was not
limited to the lowest members of society. The banker Robert Clayton also
accepted jewels and lands as security for loans from the gentry and aristoc-
racy. On one occasion, George Villiers, the second Duke of Buckingham,
used his wife’s jewels to secure two hundred gold pieces so he could gamble
with the king, and Sir Robert Howard pawned jewels as security on a loan
to pay the interest on his mortgaged estate.48
Goodwin could not expect Mary to contribute financially. Her bro-
ken leg was still mending and Goodwin had taken her out of her old neigh-
borhood and insisted that she give up her practice in physic and astrology.
Although she had fallen out of circulation after she moved to the house in
Shire Lane in early April, many of her former friends and clients contin-
ued to drop in on her or coerce her to go out to her old haunts. Goodwin
was concerned about keeping their activities secret, especially since the
buildings in Shire Lane were in very close proximity and the walls were
very thin. So by the end of April 1683, Goodwin moved Mary to lodgings
that had recently been built on the land where Arundell House used to
stand, between Somerset House and the Temple, south of the Strand. Her
rooms there were more private and much more convenient to Goodwin’s
lodging. Mary had to leave a few of her belongings at Shire Lane as collat-
eral, because neither Mary nor Goodwin was able to pay the landlady all
she was due. At this point in their partnership, Mary couldn’t possibly have
had any illusions that Goodwin was her knight in shining armor.
47. Lemire, “Consumerism in Preindustrial and Early Industrial England”; Lemire, “Theft of Clothes
and Popular Consumerism in Early Modern England,” 270.
48. Melton, Sir Robert Clayton and the Origins of English Deposit Banking, 47, 100.

Chapter 4
Finding a Familiar
Not surprisingly, the Lowlanders were not the only supernatural charac-
ters in Mary’s world. Her culture provided a wide range of spirits to draw
from: angels, demons, ghosts, fairies, and familiars. No clear definitions
existed concerning the origin or nature of these various entities. In the case
of a familiar, popular culture and philosophical opinion often differed.
According to demonological literature, a familiar was a demonic spirit that
did the witch’s bidding in return for a drop of blood or milk from a special
witch’s teat, frequently located in the genitals.1 In England, the familiar
commonly took the shape of a small animal, such as a cat, a dog, or a toad.
A witch might inherit a familiar from another witch or be given one by the
devil. The familiar represented a pact between the witch and the devil,
thereby making the accused woman a heretic. A creature described as a
fairy by a cunning person was frequently transformed into a familiar spirit
by the authorities who were prosecuting her. At the learned level, the nec-
romantic magician invoked his familiar to assist him in finding treasure or
discovering a thief. The conjured spirit could then be bound to a crystal, to
be at the beck and call of the magician. Doctor Faustus’s Mephistopheles
was this sort of familiar.
Another variation of a familiar spirit was the spirit of a deceased
person. The idea that a person’s spirit could manifest itself after death
was ancient, as seen in the biblical story of the witch of Endor (I Sam.
28:3–25 KJV). The Catholic belief in purgatory allowed that a person’s
1. For a discussion on familiars, see Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness, 71–73; Purkiss, At the Bottom of the
Garden, 152–55; Wilby, “The Witch’s Familiar and the Fairy in Early Modern England and Scotland”;
Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits.
55

56 Chapter 4
spirit might return to earth for some specific purpose. The official Prot-
estant opinion, which dismissed the concept of purgatory, maintained
that ghosts, or “souls of men,” went directly to heaven or hell and could
not return to earth.2 The seventeenth-century nonconformist minister
Richard Baxter argued that ghost stories were popish propaganda: “And
though many are said to have begged of the Living for Mastes [masses]
and Prayers, it is liker to prove a Diabolical Cheat, to promote Supersti-
tion, than that there is a Purgatory-State of Hope.”3 Nevertheless, at the
popular level, there was still a firm belief that the deceased could haunt
the earth. In 1665, in the face of imminent death, the young John Wil-
mot, second Earl of Rochester, made an agreement with a shipmate that
the first man to die would appear to the other and give an account of the
“future State” of the afterworld. Rochester was disappointed when his
companion, who died by cannon shot, did not appear to him. Rochester
attributed this to his own corrupt nature rather than taking it as proof
that the phenomenon was not possible.4 Sometimes, ghosts were even
linked to the location of treasure.
You have heard of spirits for to walk,

though many be, you He’r did see,
And with some men do seem to talk
about their hidden treasurie.5
The method of procuring a familiar spirit was made readily acces-

sible by Reginald Scot, who published a treatise in the sixteenth century
on alleged magical practices, in the hope of exposing them as ludicrous.
However, Scot’s plan backfired, and The Discoverie of Witchcraft became a
magic manual for generations to come. The aspiring magician was advised
to approach a person who was condemned to be hanged and request the
felon’s oath that he would return in spirit after death.6 The success of the
experiment rested on the courage of the deceased party and the faith of
the living. Mary got such an opportunity while she was incarcerated in
debtors’ prison for the debts of her first husband, Mr. Boucher.
2. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 587–95.

4. Burnet, Some Passages of the Life and Death of the Right Honourable John Earl of Rochester, 16–18.
5. Anon., Strange and Wonderful News from Northampton-Shire, 1 sheet.
6. Scot, Discoverie of Witchcraft, ed. Summers, bk. 15, chap. 8, p. 232.

Finding a Familiar 57
Figure 10. Lud Gate, from a seventeenth-century map of London, originally started by
Wenceslaus Hollar, ca. 1690.
There were several prisons in London for various purposes, some

better than others. Ludgate Prison was generally considered the least ter-
rible of the debtors’ prisons, which were under the jurisdiction of the city.
The prison had been constructed above Lud Gate, the original western
gate into the ancient Roman city of Londinium. At the time of Mary’s
incarceration, it stood beside the medieval St. Martin Ludgate Church,
down the street from St. Paul’s Cathedral.7 Mary would have entered the
7. When the original gate was rebuilt in 1586, there was a statue mounted on the east side to honor
MaryParish-Timbers.indb 57 12/1/15 10:20 AM

58 Chapter 4
prison through a large door in the southern entrance. The young widow’s
heart must have sunk as the heavy door thudded closed behind her. She
would have been escorted to the women’s quarters on the uppermost floor.
Five beds occupied the tiny room; inmates frequently had to share a bed
with one of the other women, which was a common practice at the time.
More unfortunate prisoners slept on the floor in makeshift bedding. This
rough accommodation cost three pence per night, plus a further eighteen
pence for the use of a pair of sheets. Seventeenth-century prisoners were
expected to pay the expenses for their own incarceration. Fourteen pence
bought them the privilege of having their names entered into the official
register of prisoners. Sixteen pence was required by the steward of the
house for table money, which covered the cost of food. And residents in a
chamber might demand further payment from a newcomer for the coals
and candles already in use. In total, the initial incarceration process could
cost more than five shillings. Prisoners were often in more debt at the end
of six months than they were when they entered.8 Nothing but the water
and the misery were free in Ludgate.
Nonetheless, Ludgate Prison was for debtors, not for felons. Inmates
could play at ninepins, a type of bowling game, on the flat, lead roof that
was covered with oak planks. They could also socialize in the cellar with
friends and family, where ale was available at tuppence a quart. Twice a
day, bells called the prisoners to prayer in the chapel. Mary would have
taken her place in the separate women’s gallery to listen to the prayers and
psalms read by male prisoners. There were stocks for punishing uncooper-
ative inmates, but a prisoner could eventually gain the privilege of going
abroad during the day for the fee of eighteen pence each time.9
Before Mary gained the privilege of leaving Ludgate during the
day, she had the assistance of George Whitmore. George was “a very
handsome man, well-shaped man and delicate hair,” who instantly took a
shine to Mary. He couldn’t do enough for the young widow. As he already
had the liberty of going abroad, he delivered instructions to the men at
her tailor’s shop and reported back on her children’s welfare. He insisted
the gate’s namesake King Lud and a statue of Queen Elizabeth on the west side fronting onto Fleet
Street. When Ludgate was demolished in 1760, these statues were incorporated into St. Dunstan’s
Church in Fleet Street where they can still be seen today,
8. For a contemporary overview on the prison, see Johnson, Ludgate; E. S., Companion for Debtors and
Prisoners; Philopolites, Present State of the Prison of Ludgate.
9. Johnson, Ludgate, 16–17, 30–31, 65–67, 73.

she borrow money from him whenever she was in need and showed her
more consideration than any man she had ever known before. On top of
his kindness, generosity, and wit, he pledged his everlasting devotion to
her. Besides feeling obligated to him for his assistance, she came “to have
wrought in her some sort of kindness” for him as well, although she told
Goodwin that she never returned his romantic passion.10
Then one day, George did not return to Ludgate in the evening. He
sent word to Mary that he was in Newgate Prison, where suspected felons
such as murderers and highwaymen were held.11 Newgate, as the name
indicates, was a later addition to the original city walls. In the twelfth
century, Henry I had it built to facilitate traffic on the north side of St.
Paul’s Cathedral. The upper stories of the structure had been used as a
prison since at least the reign of King John in the early thirteenth cen-
tury. The original building was demolished in the fifteenth century and
rebuilt as a five-story structure. The thick stone walls ensured that the
prison was cold and damp in all seasons. The corruption of the gaolers
and turnkeys contributed to the institution’s reputation as “that infamous
Castle of Misery.”12 A prisoner of means could pay for a small private
room with a real bed, blankets, a table, and even a window, albeit barred.
But poor and notorious inmates found themselves in the deep and dark
dungeons known as the Hole, where the keepers were free to administer
inhumane treatment.
By the time that George was incarcerated in Newgate, Mary was
free to leave Ludgate during the day. When she first saw George “fast in
irons,” she was so startled “that she was not at first able to speak to him, or
ask him the cause of it.” How could this be the same man who had been so
kind to her when she had no other friend in the world? He patiently started
to explain his fate: how he had been driven from one misfortune to another
until he had fallen from living well in the world to utter destitution. Not
having Mary’s moral fortitude to weather such storms, he “at last betook
himself to the worst of employments, which was to robbing,” which was a
felony and punishable by death. He explained to Mary that he could not
make peace with his Maker until he had made peace with her. He said he

11. Anon., Petition of the rebells in Nevv-Gate; Ashton, Old Bailey and Newgate, 1–2; Rumbelow, Triple Tree,
15–18.
12. England and Wales, Court of Wards and Liveries, Parliaments censure to the Iesuites and fryers, A2.

60 Chapter 4
was ashamed of having deceived her and abused her good nature, and
pleaded with her to pardon his sins against her. He said that if she was in
charity with him, he would have no trouble to accept his fate and leave this
world. “Judge yourself what effect this discourse must have upon a tender
woman who in her innocence could not but have conceived a kindness for
this miserable man.”13 She found him as kind in his dying as he had been in
his living. She freely gave her pardon for whatever wrongs he felt he might
have done her and offered whatever assistance she could in payment of his
previous generosity. She agreed to send a Catholic priest to him (as he was
also Catholic) and provide such things as he might need in his final hours.
After she returned to Ludgate, she considered what she should do. She had
developed quite a kindness for him during their brief friendship. Clemency
was sometimes granted to convicted felons based on petitions from family
or friends.14 But “to beg his life would be an eternal infamy upon herself
and her family.”15 She decided to submit to the will of God and meanwhile
do whatever service she could for him before his death.
There was little hope of a reprieve. After the sessions clerk submitted
an indictment, the grand jury declared a “true bill” at the General Sessions
of the Peace. Within a few days, the case was tried by judge and jury at the
Sessions House, known as the Old Bailey. Trials typically lasted from five
to twenty minutes. George was condemned to death by hanging.16 Early
Friday morning, George would have listened to prayers in the chapel and
taken his last communion before setting out on the longest—and last—two
and a half miles he would ever travel. Even though it signified the begin-
ning of the procession to Tyburn, it must have been a relief to emerge from
the oppression of Newgate and have the irons struck off his hands and feet.
The noose placed around his neck was a solemn reminder of what was to
come. Nevertheless, he mounted “the cart with a smiling countenance and
manly behaviour.” An observer would have thought that he was on his
way “to another’s wedding [rather] than his own funeral.”17 As the tolling
of church bells permeated the city, a procession of sheriffs, undersheriffs,
city sergeants, high constables, and deputies armed with pikes accompa-

14. Sharpe, Crime in Early Modern England, 69; Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England, 432–44.
16. A certain George Whitmore is listed in the Newgate Gaol Delivery Records for August 28, 1661,
LMA [X71/22]. Unfortunately, there are no details concerning the case.

nied the condemned men up Snow Hill unto High Holborn toward St.
Giles-in-the-Fields Church.18 Mary had hired a coach to transport her
from Ludgate to St. Giles-in-the-Fields Church, between present-day High
Holborn and Oxford Street. There she found a high place to stand as she
watched George go by one last time. When processions went to Tyburn,
a boisterous crowd usually lined the roads. Every thief, pickpocket, pros-
titute, and ballad seller in the city took advantage of such occasions. The
authorities had to elbow their way through the angry mob to protect the
prisoners from assault. But in the confusion, George managed to find the
face he loved in the crowd. Even though his hands were tied in front of
him, he managed to “pull at his hat” to acknowledge that he had not lost
his resolve, nor was he “daunted at death.”19
From St. Giles’s the cart would have rumbled down Tyburn Road.
The procession usually took more than an hour to arrive at the triangular
gallows, known as the Triple Tree, at the entrance to Hyde Park. Specta-
tors leaned out of the windows of nearby houses to obtain a better view of
the eighteen-foot-high structure, which could accommodate several peo-
ple being hanged at a time. Stands were erected around the permanent
structure for curious spectators to better view the bodies as they swung
from the three beams. Typically, condemned men had fifteen minutes to
confer with the prison chaplain one last time. George “made the people an
exhortation to the service of God and the avoiding of sin,” and asked for
the prayers of all good people present.20 It was customary to place a few
coins in the hand of the hangman before a handkerchief was placed over
the man’s eyes. The noose already in place around George’s neck would
have been securely tied to the crossbar of the gallows. When the cart drove
away, George would have slowly strangled to death. The quick drop that
broke the windpipe was a later innovation to the technique of hanging.
Sometimes relatives of the condemned would pull on the person’s legs in
order to hurry the slow death by strangulation.21
Mary had made funeral arrangements well in advance. She did
not want to risk George’s body being stolen and sold. Each year a few
corpses of executed murderers were given to the College of Physicians
18. The details of a regular execution at Tyburn are drawn from Houlbrooke, “Age of Decency,” 180–
85; Gittings, “Sacred and Secular,” 149–57; and McKenzie, Tyburn’s Martyrs, 1–20.
20. Ibid.
21. McKenzie, Tyburn’s Martyrs, 19.

62 Chapter 4
Figure 11. Tyburn Tree, detail from William Hogarth, The Idle ’Prentice Executed at Tyburn,
engraving, 1747, plate 11 of his Industry and Idleness series.
Figure 12. A plaque at the site of Tyburn (photo by author).

for dissection. But since this was not enough to satisfy the demand for
cadavers, there was a considerable trade in body snatching and grave rob-
bing.22 The grisly corpses hung for an hour before they were cut down.
George’s clothes would have been given to the hangman as part of his fee,
the naked body then shrouded in a winding sheet. Mary had arranged for
a coach to bring a very good coffin to Tyburn to convey George’s body
to a house near St. Giles-without-Cripplegate, where he was to be buried
later that evening. Four pence could hire a gravedigger and a few shillings
could provide a brief ceremony. Mary may have hired a bellman to ring
one stroke for each year of George’s life.
But the details of George’s burial were the least of Mary’s concerns.
In the brief period between George’s death sentence and his execution,
Mary had contemplated a magical procedure that she knew about. She
was certain that George possessed the love and kindness toward her that
was necessary for him to return to her as a familiar spirit after death. She
carefully explained to him that he could return to her in spirit without
trouble to himself or injury to his soul. “Ah madam,” he said,
I ask but one thing of you and you give me a thousand. I

asked only to die in your charity and with your pardon for
having offended you and justly deserved your anger. And you
give me the power of perpetual happiness. For next to serving
God, which this will no ways hinder me of, there is nothing
can please my thoughts but the liberty of coming to you again
when I am dead, and telling you how much I loved you whilst
alive; and how since then still continue to do it. And also by
the services I shall then do you, hear you repeat again your
having forgiven me what I did whilst living, and that I have
made you some requital after atonement for them. And for
all the rest, you have enlightened me more than enough. I am
methinks all eyes and all understanding already, and I won-
der that the blackish, foolish world should never know this
already other than by old women’s stories to fright children
to bed, since the reason of it is as plain to me now, as why I
now speak to you loaded with chains. I ever took you indeed
for a person beyond all that I had ever seen in the world; I
wondered and stood amazed when I heard you talk, but that
your wisdom went ever out of the world I never dreamt of nor
22. Gittings, “Sacred and Secular,” 149.

64 Chapter 4
could imagine. But I do assure you I will be sure to follow your

instructions; I will be sure to do it. And as soon as ever my
soul hath left this body of mine I will wait upon you and meet
you wherever you please to appoint me, and give you thanks
a thousand one after another for this favour you have thought
me worthy of and this knowledge you have imparted to me.23
This was the reason he had gone to his death like a man who was going to
his wedding rather than his funeral.
After Mary saw George’s body safely delivered to the church, she pro-
ceeded to Moorfields on the north side of the city walls at three o’clock in the
afternoon. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the swampy ground of
Moorfields had been drained and avenues of trees and walks had been laid
out in the orderly, geometric French style made popular during the Renais-
sance. However, prior to the Great Fire of London in 1666, the fields were
mostly occupied by laundresses bleaching their linens, occasional wrestlers
competing, and leisurely strollers.24 In this place of solitude, Mary’s grief
and anticipation must have been a heady mixture of emotions. Imagine her
hopes and fears as she closed her eyes and pictured George as he was in life,
“well spoken and witty,” who had told her that “he loved her above all the
women in the world.”25 When she opened her eyes, her imagination was per-
sonified: George’s figure appeared in front of her, saluting her in his familiar
manner. The apparition smiled and in a faint and scratchy voice told her that
he was feeling very weak and would meet her again on the morrow. The next
day she returned to Moorfields and he appeared again, and the next, until
he had regained his strength and she could hear him speak in a low voice.
***
Mary’s emotions were running high. Quite likely she would have married
George if the tides had not turned against him. And she had just witnessed
his grisly execution. She was basically all alone in the world, a young widow
estranged from her birth family. So is it surprising that Mary’s imagination
and belief manifested the spirit of George from the depths of her grief ?

24. Thornbury, Old and New London, 2:196–97.

The sixteenth-century magus Agrippa advised magicians to “vehemently,

imagine, hope, and believe strongly” to attain positive results when practic-
ing magic.26 Even if Mary was not familiar with the intellectual discourse
on the subject of the imagination, she shared the ubiquitous belief in the
spirit world of the seventeenth century. There was a widespread belief in
the power of the imagination and fantasy to physically manifest things.
People believed that a fetus could be negatively affected by a pregnant
woman’s fright or by the sight of a deformed person.27 Mary’s contempo-
rary Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle (1623–73), poetically
proposed that “every human creature can create an immaterial world fully
inhabited by immaterial creatures . . . whatsoever his fancy leads him to.”28
And Mary fancied George.
***
Following George’s execution, Mary stayed in Ludgate for another twelve

months until one of the solicitors who hung around the prison doors look-
ing for prospective clients asked her why she had been incarcerated so long.
When he investigated the charges against her, he found that the creditors’
suits were now null and void for want of process, so she was free to return
to her tailoring shop and her young family.
George was not only a great comfort to Mary in the days ahead,
but he was an invaluable source of information as well. Because of her
reputation in physic, people sought her out for her advice and counsel.
However, she got exceedingly angry when they approached her to tell their
fortunes. This indicates the cultural distinction that existed between a com-
mon fortune-teller, who was frequently a gypsy, and a cunning person,
who was generally respected by the community (if not always by the law).
On one occasion, an apprentice approached Mary to tell his fortune. She
replied, “Sir, you are a thief and a murderer.” The young man stared at
her in amazement. “How so?” says he. She answered, “Because you have
murdered a Jackanapes and stolen away his face!”29 The poor fellow slunk
away like a fool while his master roared with laughter.
26. Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy, ed. Tyson, trans. Freake, bk. 1, chap. 66, p. 206.
27. Rublack, “Pregnancy, Childbirth and the Female Body in Early Modern Germany,” 96.
28. Cavendish, Blazing World and Other Writings, ed. Lilley, 123.

66 Chapter 4
Whenever Mary agreed to give her opinion concerning some loss or

grievance, she pretended it was by the science of astrology, of which she
had a very good understanding. Astrology was a male-dominated practice;
however, Sarah Ginnor, who also practiced physic, was knowledgeable
enough to write The Woman’s Almanack in 1659, which was aimed at other
females. George provided an even more reliable source of information
than predictive astrology. When Mary was pressed for her advice, she told
the person that the next time she saw them she would give her opinion.
Then she asked George to look into the matter for her.
On one such occasion, she gained a valuable friendship. The scriv-
ener Robert Clayton, who was later knighted and became the director of
the Bank of England, lost a great diamond ring worth several hundred
pounds. He thought that he had taken it off while washing his hands in
the kitchen. Mary was summoned to his shop at the sign of the Flying
Horse, in the parish of St. Michael’s Cornhill. After meeting with Clayton
briefly, she sent George to locate the ring. In a few minutes she was able
to tell Clayton that he need not worry, for his ring was in his closet among
his papers. It had not been stolen by his servants, as he suspected. Clay-
ton returned the favor on several occasions. One evening when Mary was
socializing in an inn with some friends, a city sergeant by the name of Mr.
Howard was among the company. In jest, she said that if he met her the
next morning, she would marry him. Unfortunately, the poor fellow took
her seriously. When Mary stood him up, he believed himself to be the butt
of a joke and held a grievance against her for years afterward. Whenever
she came within the bounds of the city, he arrested her, taking pleasure in
pulling her about and abusing her. On these occasions, Clayton came to
her aid and bailed her out. Part of his banking practice was to grant loans
based on the value of goods that were proffered as security—basically, a
sophisticated pawning business. Perhaps he paid Mary’s bail based on her
personal credit and reputation.
In any case, Mary had much to thank George Whitmore for during
both his life and death. But as we shall see, Mary suffered from bad luck
and worse management in the following years. Eventually, she found her-
self all alone in the world. In addition to her cunning craft, she resumed
her former occupation as a textile broker, buying and selling lace and
cloth. However, luck was against her even in this. On one occasion, she
had taken possession of almost a hundred pounds’ worth of lace on credit,
which she was to sell on behalf of another person. When another woman

took advantage of her good nature and ran off with the lace, Mary was
indebted for the hundred pounds.
As if that were not devastating enough, she was robbed by a simple
maid she employed at the time. The wench bided her time until she knew
that Mary was abroad and would not soon be home. With the help of
accomplices, she cleaned out the house, leaving Mary with little more than
the clothes on her back. Mary quickly sent George to discover the maid’s
whereabouts and was able to apprehend the girl. As she was carrying the
maid to the justice of the peace, the girl’s rogue accomplices attacked her.
Mary was beaten and the girl got away. This insult, on top of the loss of
her possessions, put her in a mighty passion. She immediately got angry
with George for not forewarning her of these events. He explained that the
robbery and attack were both done on the spur of the moment; he had no
way of knowing ahead of time or of preventing them if he had. “Besides,”
he said, “his business was chiefly to serve God, contenting himself at any
time to tell her what she asked him.”30 This response made her all the more
angry. Mary’s high temperament had often been her downfall, and this
was no exception. She flew into a fiery rage and dismissed George, never
intending to recall him again.
After she sent George away, Mary fell even lower. For a mere
five pounds, she pawned her precious grimoire when she had no other
resources. She was weary of the world and broken from all her misfor-
tunes. Everything she touched failed. She had neither the spirit nor the
will to continue. Brandy and the merry company of the many whores
in her neighborhood temporarily took away her cares. At three pence,
a quartern of brandy was cheaper than good meat, so sometimes she
substituted alcohol for food for two or three days at a time. When she
sobered up, there was “a gnawing at her stomach” until she drank
more.31 By the winter of 1682/83, Mary’s broken leg had served to fur-
ther reduce her meager source of income. And it was in this state of
affairs that she met Goodwin.
Of course, Goodwin was very anxious for Mary to recall George.
Alone in her small chamber, Mary softly spoke George’s name and
beseeched him to come to her as he had in the past. There was no response.
Mary’s relationship with George had always been personal and informal.
30. Ibid., 1:64.

31. Ibid.

68 Chapter 4
But perhaps she used a more formal invocation for calling spirits. One
entitled “An experiment of the dead” was readily accessible in Scot’s The
Discoverie of Witchcraft:
I conjure thee spirit of [George Whitmore] by the living

God, the true God, and by the holy God, and by their virtues
and powers which have created both thee and me, and all
the world. I conjure thee [George Whitmore] by these holy
names of God, Tetragrammaton, Adonay, Algramay, Saday, Sabaoth,
Planaboth, Panthon, Craton, Neupmaton, Deus, Homo, Omnipotens,
Sempiturnus, Ysus, Terra, Unigenitus, Salvator, Via, Vita, Manus, Fons,
Origo, Filius. And by their virtues and powers, and by all their
names, by the which God gave power to man, both to speak or
think; so by their virtues and powers I conjure thee to immedi-
ately appear before me without any tarrying or deceit. Fiat, fiat,
fiat: Amen.32
Whatever words Mary used, within a couple of hours George’s familiar

figure once again materialized.
Goodwin was pleased that George had been recalled, but he was not
satisfied to have knowledge of him secondhand. George was only visible
and audible to Mary. He badgered Mary to transfer her relationship with
George over to him. If she did so, she would lose the power to call George
or converse directly with him herself. Reluctantly, she made the proposal to
George, who argued that it was not part of their initial agreement. Mary
was past fifty years old (according to Mary, she shared her birthday with
King Charles II on May 29, 1630) and might not live much longer, but
Goodwin was only thirty and might live another fifty years. George had
agreed to serve Mary out of his deep affection for her, but his true vocation
was to serve God. He told her that if she persisted with this request, he
would vex and trouble her. Mary disliked being told what she could and
couldn’t do; she stubbornly continued to plague him about it. In return,
he often woke her in the night and pulled her about and constantly chided
her. At length they came to this reconciliation: he would agree to come to
Goodwin but only for as long as Mary lived.
A time was set for the transfer. Mary and Goodwin sat in her lodging
awaiting George’s arrival. Suddenly, a chill wind passed between them.
32. Scot, Discoverie of Witchcraft, ed. Summers, bk. 15, chap. 8, pp. 232–33.

George had come and stepped on Mary’s toes to let her know he wished
to speak to her privately. Goodwin went out the door into the hall, but he
could hear George speaking to Mary in a low voice. George told Mary that
he objected to coming to Goodwin, because Goodwin had not yet prayed
for him. When Goodwin heard this, he argued that he had not willfully
omitted praying for him, but that it was not fit for Protestants to pray for
the dead, especially in the nonconformist version of Protestantism under
which Goodwin had been raised. Masses and prayers for the dead were
considered popish practices, which had long since been excised from the
Church of England. But Goodwin agreed to pray for George in a manner
he felt would be acceptable to his faith as well as to George’s.
A few days later, the three arranged to meet in Moorfields at the
same hour, day, and place where George had first appeared to Mary after
his execution. It was a dreary April day, with drizzly showers. The spot
where George had first appeared to her was still identifiable. Close to the
path was “a round spot above a yard over whereon the grass had never
since grown,” which appeared russet like grass after a drought. As they
approached the spot, Mary hurried over to George. Goodwin, of course,
could not see him. George told her in a low voice that he could not appear
to Goodwin at that time because of the rain, which was “very injurious”
to his airy form.33 He would try to muster his strength to appear again in
two hours. But when they returned, it was raining even harder. They knew
they could not expect George’s appearance that day.
The transfer of George was further complicated by the queen of
the Lowlanders, who demanded that Goodwin stop attempting to have
George as his own personal spirit. At first Goodwin was a little resistant,
but the queen insisted that if he would not willingly show her this pref-
erence, he should never see any of the Lowlanders. She wanted to be
his number-one contact with the spirit world. Goodwin had little choice
but to agree to her terms. As a consolation, George agreed to answer
any questions directed to him as long as Goodwin turned his back and
did not look directly where George stood. However, Goodwin could not
understand the spirit very clearly, as he spoke in a low, soft voice close to
Mary’s ear. So throughout their relationship, Goodwin relied on Mary to
communicate with George.

70 Chapter 4
Goodwin was also keen to retrieve the lost grimoire. The pawnbroker
had since moved, but luck would have it that Mary met him in the street
one day. She only had twenty shillings about her so she could not redeem
the book at that very moment, but for ten shillings she got one of the lit-
tle translations she had previously commissioned. She told him that she
would return in a few days to retrieve the rest. But the broker, suspicious of
the true value of the book, told her that it would cost more than she had
originally pawned it for. This led to a falling-out—he being a very cross
fellow and she flying easily into a passion. Furthermore, he had apparently
opened the book and now swore that it was a conjuring book (which, of
course, it was), and he would have her before a justice of the peace. A con-
stable was called for, and Mary and her book were carried before Justice
Parry. Fortunately, the justice knew Mary’s third husband, from whom she
was estranged at the time. The judge ordered the pawnbroker to relin-
quish the book to its rightful owner for the original price. Since Mary did
not have five pounds with her, Mrs. Seymour, an acquaintance who had
somehow gotten caught up in the dispute, paid the fee and carried away
the book for safekeeping. So far, so good. But by the time Mary gathered
together the money, Mrs. Seymour had moved her lodging. It took Mary a
few days to discover her new location, by which time the woman had gone
to Bedford to visit her sick child, who was in the care of a wet nurse. Mary
followed her out to the country where Mrs. Seymour promised that she
would return in a few days and restore the book to its proper owner. But
the woman had debts of her own that she was avoiding in the city. In the
end, the retrieval of the book turned out to be impossible.

Chapter 5
Matters of Marriage
George proved very useful in communicating with the Lowlanders. He
flitted back and forth between them and Mary. In June 1683, Mary and
Goodwin patiently waited for the floods on Hounslow Heath to recede.
Spring blossomed into summer and another meeting with the queen was
arranged. The couple once again traveled to the village of Hounslow the
evening before. They rose early the next morning at the inn and awaited
word from George. Time ticked slowly on. Eleven o’clock. Twelve o’clock.
One o’clock. Two o’clock. Finally, a little before four o’clock, George
arrived to tell them that before the flood, the king and queen had been
entertaining a group of Portuguese lords and ladies who were friends and
relatives of the queen. The visitors had also been detained by the bad
weather and were anxious to be on their way home at the earliest possibil-
ity. So early that morning, the king and queen, with a great entourage from
the court, had ridden out with their guests to see them on their way. The
queen had planned to be back at Hounslow by two or three o’clock at the
latest. But when the party had ridden for fourteen or fifteen miles, the king
resolved that they would have dinner together. The party fell to drinking
pretty hard, encouraged by the king, and one of the Portuguese dukes
requested that the king and queen continue with their retinue to the place
where they planned to stay the night. The king quickly consented before
the queen could make excuses. George returned with the disappointing
news that their appointment would be delayed until the next day.
The following day, George brought worse news. In his drunken state,
the king had told his guests that he would continue with them all the way
to the port of Rye in East Sussex, to see them boarded on their ship. The
queen could not appear unhappy with this decision since the Portuguese
71

72 Chapter 5
were her relatives, as well as being royal guests. A further delay arose when
the king insisted that he would not leave until he saw his guests set sail. So
the whole party was staying at Rye awaiting a favorable wind. Mary and
Goodwin sent word that they would wait a day or two at Hounslow in
hopes that the wind would soon be fair.
While Mary and Goodwin waited for the Lowlanders to return from
Rye, they attempted another magical undertaking. Mary was never at a
loss for some project or other. This time it was a love charm, using a green
frog captured at a particular astrological hour. These sorts of charms were
widely known thanks to critics of magic such as Reginald Scot and the
German magician Agrippa.1 The charm engendered extreme passions:
the left-side bone was for love, and the right-side bone was for hate. Just
as Mary was about to throw the offal out the window, Goodwin called to
her to stop. He was concerned that frog guts outside the window of the
inn might raise suspicions. Mary, in her stubborn manner, took offense
at being ordered about and made all the more haste to dispose of the
remains. When Goodwin caught hold of her arm to stop her, she flew into
a rage; after the abuse she had suffered at the hands of her husbands, she
imagined that Goodwin intended to strike her.
Mary had experienced marriage very early in her life. When she
was twelve or thirteen years old, she was living with her Uncle John in
Chelmsford. At this point in her life, she had secretly obtained the grimoire
that would aid in her future work as a cunning woman. But her uncle
wanted her to polish her skills as a future wife. He sent her to one of the
private boarding schools for girls in Hackney parish, northeast of London.
She had already learned basic reading and writing skills in the elementary
school in Watlington. Mockingly nicknamed the Ladies’ Universities of
Female Arts, these schools were a recent development at the time. These
new schools were staffed by a generous supply of French schoolmasters
who came to England as Huguenot exiles. At one time, French Calvinist
Protestants were protected by the French monarchy. But in the seventeenth
century, they were no longer welcome in officially Catholic France, and
many took refuge in Protestant countries.
Mary did not name the particular school she attended, but there
were several to choose from in the early 1640s. Annual fees could be
1. Scot, Discoverie of Witchcraft, ed. Summers, bk. 6, chap. 8, p. 71; Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philos-
ophy, ed. Tyson, trans. Freake, bk. 1, chap. 42, p. 125.

Matters of Marriage 73
upward to twelve pounds, which included instruction as well as lodging,

meat and drink, fuel, candlelight, and laundry services.2 At the Hackney
school, Mary honed her housewifery skills and also learned how to keep
accounts—skills that proved useful in the years to follow. Fine embroi-
dery, calligraphy, and handicrafts in silver, straw, and glass were also con-
sidered necessary elements of a young woman’s education. The music,
singing, dancing, and French lessons caused more conservative citizens to
condemn the Hackney schools as immoral and frivolous.3 However, these
skills primed young gentlewomen for travel abroad, life at court, or a good
marriage into a gentry family. In Mary’s case, the school granted her the
opportunity of traveling with Lady Dorothy Osborne, wife of the royalist
Sir Peter Osborne, to St. Malo in Brittany when the civil war broke out.
Young girls were often invited to serve as companions and maids to elite
women.4
The Hackney schools were renowned for their attractive residents.
The well-known womanizer Samuel Pepys confessed that he visited Hack-
ney “chiefly to see . . . the young ladies of the schools, whereof there is great
store, very pretty.”5 And later in the century, the author Daniel Defoe wrote
that he thought it should be a “Felony . . . to solicit any Woman, though
it were to marry, while she was in the House,” indicating the popularity
of such practices.6 This may have been why Mr. Boucher, Mary’s future
2. The City of London patronized an institution operated by one Mrs. Winch. Mrs. Salmon ran a large
school that the well-known poet Katherine Philips attended as a girl. Several smaller, less prestigious
schools were favored by the merchant class. History of the County of Middlesex, vol. 1, ed. Cockburn; Gar-
diner, English Girlhood at School. The fee of twelve pounds was recorded in the journal of Giles Moore,
1669. Gardiner mentions a sum of eleven pounds paid in 1638 but does not provide a source.
3. The antiquarian John Aubrey criticized the schools in Hackney as places where girls learned pride
and wantonness; Vincent, State and School Education, 220.
4. Lady Osborne’s daughter Dorothy, the future Lady Temple, was three years older than Mary. Mary
recounted that Mrs. Osborne was accompanied by her brother, who was later made Earl of Danby. It
is true that Lady Osborne’s older brother, Henry Danvers, was the first Earl of Danby, but he had held
that title since 1626. In the 1640s his health was not good, and it is unlikely that he accompanied his
sister to France. It is more likely that Mary was referring to Sir Thomas Osborne, who was awarded
with the resurrected title of Earl of Danby in 1674 by Charles II. Thomas was the great nephew of
Lady Osborne through his grandmother, Lady Osborne’s sister. Mary might have misremembered the
ten-year-old Thomas as a brother of the younger Dorothy Osborne rather than a cousin. This theory
is difficult to either support or refute because it is unknown where Sir Thomas lived between 1639 and
1644. Browning, Thomas Osborne, Earl of Danby and Duke of Leeds, 14; Complete Peerage of England, Scotland,
Ireland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom, 4:48–49, 7:507. The accuracy of Mary’s story is significant
because Goodwin’s biographer uses this anecdote to cast doubt on Mary’s story about the Hackney
school and her general credibility; Clark, Goodwin Wharton, 333n6.
5. Samuel Pepys as quoted in Vincent, State and School Education, 214.
6. Daniel Defoe, An Essay upon Projects (1697), 282, as quoted in Vincent, State and School Education, 223.

74 Chapter 5
husband, went to Hackney. Perhaps he was intentionally searching for a

wife, or, more accurately, a housekeeper and bookkeeper. In any event,
the thirteen-year-old Mary was taken in by the tailor who was “very well
shaped and dressing well; and wearing a periwig, which at that time was a
strange thing and thought very becoming.”7 The couple probably got mar-
ried at one of the Middlesex parish churches outside the walls of London.
Select churches had the right to perform marriages without the delay of
obtaining a license or waiting for banns to be read for three Sundays in a
row.8 There are no surviving registers of marriages in these churches before
1665, so Mary’s wedding still remains a mystery. After the secret ceremony,
Mary returned to her boarding school. She sat listlessly at the supper table
with her spoon in her hand, unable to eat a bite. When the school mistress
inquired about her apparent melancholy, a friend who had accompanied
her to the church disclosed the whole affair, to the horror of everyone.
As a result of the clandestine marriage, Mary was forced to return
to her father’s house in Turville. Her father could have easily taken Mr.
Boucher to the ecclestiastical courts to have the marriage dissolved, as it
had not been consummated. Goodwin commented that the marriage was
“a knavish trick and no way binding by equity or justices & for which
[Boucher] rather deserv’d to be punished.”9 But instead, Mary’s father
chastised her with all the hard words one can imagine. Her mother was
dead, and she had no one to take her side. To make matters worse, her
younger brothers and sisters mocked her and called her husband “prick-
louse” (pronounced “prick-less”), a derisive term for a tailor. Even the ser-
vants ridiculed her, and her father did nothing to interfere. Regrettably,
Mary had inherited the passionate Tomson spirit and, being too young
to understand the folly of her ways (or more likely, too stubborn to admit
them), she resolved to face her fate with her new husband in London.
Mary’s willful nature would prove to be the destruction of her rela-
tionship with her father. After she went to London, he would not take any
7. A periwig was a very stylized wig, which remained in use by the judicial profession. Periwigs did not
come into fashion until the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. However, the antiquarian Anthony
Wood recorded the purchase of a periwig as early as 1656. Unfortunately, immediately after the wed-
ding vows, Mr. Boucher’s “great ornament” came off, and Mary found him extremely “deformed”
without it; Autobiography of Goodwin Wharton, 1:23.
8. After 1642, there were several churches that performed such quick and secret marriages, including
All Hallows London Wall, St. James Duke’s Place, St. Katherine by the Tower, and Holy Trinity,
Minories (now part of St. Botolph’s Aldgate); Benton, Irregular Marriage in London before 1754, 10–24.

Figure 13. St. Mary’s Church, Turville (photo by author).
notice of her or abide so much as to hear her name. Over the years, she
tried many times to reconcile with him: most of all, she wanted his blessing
on her new life. But he would answer “that if she came down to him he
would send her away in a cart to the next parish as a vagabond.”10 The
thought of her father’s everlasting hatred and perpetual scorn eventually
motivated her to ride down to Turville and surprise him at Sunday service.
(Mary maintained that she was raised Catholic, and she never attempted
to explain the fact that her father attended Anglican services. Perhaps he
converted to Protestantism later in life. Or perhaps only Mary’s mother
was Catholic. Or perhaps the family secretly clung to the old religion
but publicly practiced Anglicanism.) Mary hesitantly entered the parish
church of St. Mary the Virgin. No sooner had she put her foot inside the
door than her father stormed out, leaving her in a swoon on the cold, stone
floor. Later, “her father sent her so positive a denial to come near him
and persisted in it so strongly to the last” that she never saw him again.
In his will, he left her only forty shillings, which was a child’s portion, and
requested that she renounce any claim to his estate.11

11. Ibid., 1:26.

76 Chapter 5
So at the tender age of fourteen, Mary Tomson of Turville became

Mrs. Boucher of the city of London. Although twelve was the legal age for
females to marry, the more common age for a young woman to become
a wife in England was her mid-twenties. But Mary’s youth was only half
of the equation. Upon arriving in London, Mary discovered that her new
husband was almost old enough to be her grandfather. Such a difference in
ages was considered an anomaly even at that time. Mary only referred to
her elderly husband as Mr. Boucher, which makes it difficult to identify him
in the archives (although his first name might not be much more helpful).
There is a slight possibility that a man by the name of James Bowghker
(an alternate spelling of Boucher) could have been Mary’s husband. James
Bowghker, listed in the Merchant Taylors Company, was apprenticed to
William Greene, and became a freeman of the Company by finishing
his apprenticeship on June 30, 1595. If this Boucher was approximately
twenty-one years old in 1595 (the common age to complete an appren-
ticeship), he would have been sixty-nine years old in 1643.12 However, not
every tailor in London was in the Merchant Taylors Company. The livery
companies, which regulated the trades in London, had little control out-
side the civic boundaries defined by the walls of London. Mary’s husband
Mr. Boucher could have been one of the many non-freemen operating
a craft outside the jurisdiction of the livery companies.13 Alternately, he
could have been a freeman in one of the many other livery companies. By
the middle of the seventeenth century, any freeman of any London com-
pany could practice any trade.
Mary was quite the catch for an old, widowed tailor, even if she
came without her father’s blessing or the customary dowry payment. The
bride’s father, or the bride herself, usually offered a dowry in the form of
money, goods, or lands to help the new couple get established. The hus-
band had use and control of this property during the marriage. This was
not as important in a marriage between two well-established people, or in
this case, between an older, established man and a younger woman. As a
young woman, Mary’s “skin was soft and white,” and a man “might have
span’d her in the waist.” Her thick, black hair “hung upon the ground
12. Guild Hall, London, Merchant Taylors Company Membership Guide (1997). There are no re-
cords of Freedom Lists for the Corporation of London prior to 1668.
13. Davies, “Governors and Governed,” 74–77. The medieval guild system had deteriorated; Earle,
Making of the English Middle Class, 251.

a foot, from top to bottom full of ring[lets].” In addition to her physical

beauty, she was accomplished in singing, dancing, and playing the guitar.
Like most young women her age, she had developed competent housewif-
ery skills and was well trained by the Hackney school in the keeping of
accounts. Eventually, Mary learned to love her husband in “a kind and
dutiful” manner. She told Goodwin that she never overtly expressed any
“affection or fondness” for him, despite the “excessive wedding joys” the
old man displayed at the beginning.14
While Mr. Boucher was alive, Mary managed both the household
and the workmen. She also supplemented the family income by trafficking
in various merchandise, including cloth. Tailors often sold leftover mate-
rials, so Mary would have found this a natural extension to her husband’s
trade.15 Technically, all traders were supposed to be licensed by the city of
London, but many part-time and petty traders evaded the system, and it is
quite likely that Mary traded in just such an informal manner. By buying
and selling from the brokers, she claimed that she could sometimes make
four or five pounds in a morning. There is always the possibility that some
of the goods were stolen, as there was a flourishing trade in illicit textiles
during this period.16
Even though Mary was a good and faithful wife, Mr. Boucher started
to neglect her. Nevertheless, he did not neglect her quite enough: she was
almost continually with child. In less than seven years, she gave birth to
seven daughters. Although Mary knew that her husband had spent a lot
of time drinking at the local tavern, she was not aware of how badly he
had neglected his business until after he died. Between his drinking and the
mismanagement of his affairs, “there was not one farthing of money in the
house” when he died.17 Even worse, they were in serious debt. Mary had
to borrow money just to give him a decent burial. A married woman could
not make legal contracts, so her earnings belonged to her husband, but a
widow could sometimes continue her husband’s trade. After Boucher died,
Mary used what credit she could get to maintain the tailor’s business and
was able to keep as many as ten men at a time employed in the workshop.
In addition to maintaining the tailoring workshop, Mary began “to own

15. Davies, “Governors and Governed,” 77.
16. Lemire, “Theft of Clothes and Popular Consumerism in Early Modern England,” 257.

78 Chapter 5
her self to have skill both in physick and chirurgery: which she had not
long done.” She had learned much of the practical skills from her Uncle
John and had “perused her beloved book many times when alone, waiting
for her late husband’s coming in.” She gained a certain amount of fame
for her knowledge of the art.18
For almost six years, Mary thrived, keeping her children very com-
fortably and building respect and admiration from her peers. But despite
her good business sense, she was too young and inexperienced to seek
advice on legal matters regarding her husband’s debts. Whenever a credi-
tor came to her, she readily paid his debts as far as she could, but she made
no effort to collect outstanding debts that were owed to her husband. Just
before the six-year statute of limitations for pursuing debt ran out, her
husband’s creditors joined together and laid an action against her.19 Any
person who was owed more than two pounds could issue a writ to have the
debtor arrested; the system was often used as a way to exert pressure on
the debtor to pay up.20 This was how she had ended up in Ludgate Prison
where she met George.
About six months after George was executed, which was approxi-
mately one year after Mary’s initial incarceration in Ludgate, a hand-
some gentleman presented himself with the express purpose of courting
her. A certain Mr. Lawrence (again we are not informed of a first name)
approached her, based on her virtuous reputation and their family connec-
tions. The two were related somehow through family in Berkshire, where
he owned an estate, and apparently there had been discussion of their mar-
rying when they were children. When they met, one of Lawrence’s legs was
lame from a musket shot that he had received while serving as a soldier.
Mary consulted George (in his spirit form) about the matter, but he “gave
her no great encouragement to it, but bid her take heed.”21 In spite of
George’s caution, Lawrence made a good impression on Mary. And his
infirmity did not prevent him from the active and adventurous life of a
seaman.
At this point, one might wonder if Mary had a desperate need to
remarry. According to her own account, she had enjoyed a great deal of
18. Ibid., 1:27.

19. 21 Jac. I. c. 16 (1623–24), “An acte for lymytac~on of Acc~ons, and for avoyding of Suite in
Lawe.” Statutes of the Realm, vol. 4, pt. 2, [1586–1624], 1222.
20. Earle, Making of the English Middle Class, 125.

autonomy since Mr. Boucher’s death, at least until her incarceration for
his debts. A widow was in a better legal position than a wife, who was sub-
servient to her husband in all matters. As the widow of a craftsman with a
successful workshop, it is surprising that she had not been asked to remarry
before this. Widows were often seen as opportunities for career advance-
ment. But Mr. Lawrence did not seem very interested in Mary’s business
skills as a tailor or as a cunning woman. He preferred to continue his voca-
tion at sea. Perhaps he was looking for a stepmother for his three children
from a previous marriage. Given Mary’s financial circumstances, he was
risking becoming responsible for her debts. Maybe Mary was the active
partner in promoting the match. She would have had much to gain from
Lawrence’s Berkshire estate and his seaman’s salary. Regardless of who
pursued whom, the courtship resulted in her falling in love—in fact, she
maintained that Mr. Lawrence was the only husband she ever truly loved.22
Because the couple were afraid that Mary’s creditors might go after
Lawrence as her new husband, they arranged to marry secretly. Trinity
Chapel, which had been recently rebuilt on the south side of Hyde Park,
was frequently used by couples who wished to keep their marriages pri-
vate.23 Mary arrived on the main street that ran through Knightsbridge
a little before the groom and began to fret over her decision (perhaps
demonstrating her attachment to her independence). By the time Mr. Law-
rence and his friends entered the chapel, she had slipped out the back door
and hastily retreated to London while the groom and his guests “looked
upon one another like fools.”24 Eventually, the party returned to Mr. Law-
rence’s city house to enjoy the wedding dinner minus the bride. Not to be
defeated, Lawrence set a new date. This time he met her at the prison and
escorted her to the ceremony, giving her no chance of escaping the second
time around.
Mary joined her new husband a few months later when she finally
gained her freedom from Ludgate. Rather than finding support from Law-
rence, Mary became his meal ticket. Within the first few months of their
22. There is no one by the name of Lawrence listed in the Allegations for Marriage Licences issued by
the Faculty Office of the Archbishop of Canterbury for the period in question. However, the death of
one Vincent Lawrence is registered in the St. Sepulchre parish records for 1668, which is in accordance
with Mary’s statement that she married her third husband less than a year after Lawrence’s death.
23. Trinity Chapel was a chapel of ease under the authority of Westminster Abbey. Many of the mar-
riages performed there were marked as “private” or “secrecy”; Walford, Old and New London, 5:22–23.

80 Chapter 5
marriage, Mary learned that the estate in Berkshire was mortgaged to the
hilt, and the money had been spent on whoring and debauchery. At first
she tried to resign herself to his lies and base behavior. But when he would
return from sea and spend his whole pay before he even reached her door,
she would resolve never to see him again. However, “he would fawn upon
her, like a spaniel, protest his sorrow and humble himself like a slave.”25
On one occasion, a few days after Lawrence’s return from a sea voy-
age, an extremely ugly washerwoman showed up at their door. Mary was
on her way out to run an errand and instructed the woman to wait in her
chamber with Mr. Lawrence until she returned. Mary went about her busi-
ness and returned in the company of a friend. As the women entered the
room, Mr. Lawrence climbed out of the four-poster bed, carefully drawing
the bed curtains closed behind him. Mary took no notice, and her friend
sat down at the table. After some time, Mary’s acquaintance took her leave.
Then, to Mary’s surprise, the unseemly washerwoman emerged from the
bed, complaining that Mary was “so impudent to make [her] lie so long
here, when [her] husband threw [her] upon the bed whether [she] would
or no.” Mary “wondering at her impudence & that [Mr. Lawrence] would
suffer it . . . grew upon it very ill and sick.”26
The next morning Mr. Lawrence went abroad and did not return
all day. Mary waited up for him until one o’clock in the morning. She
suspected where he might be. She marched straight over to the washer-
woman’s lodging, where she discovered her wayward husband slithering
into the woman’s bed. Mary called her an impudent slut; the woman
responded by commanding Lawrence to kick his wife down the stairs. In
response, he stood ominously at the top of the staircase; Mary left in tears.
But by the time he returned home the following morning at ten o’clock,
Mary’s humiliation had turned to indignation. When he demanded his
dinner, Mary advised him to get it where he had gotten his supper and
breakfast. Before the argument could escalate, the washerwoman arrived
on the scene. Mary went to the top of the stairs and told her that she would
not make a bawdy house of her home again and threatened to kick her
down the steps. The words were barely out of her mouth when Lawrence
came from behind and pushed Mary head first down the staircase. She was
so battered and bruised that people shunned her: they thought she was a

26. Ibid.

plague victim because of the many plasters she wore where the skin was
scraped off her face. This was just one example of Mary’s stormy relation-
ship with her second husband. Mr. Lawrence died sometime in 1668 after
two years of being sick with “a distemper.” Perhaps it was some sort of
venereal disease.27
After these experiences, Mary had good reason to be cautious about
Goodwin’s intentions when he grabbed her arm during their disagreement
in the room at Hounslow. She stormed out, cursing his name and swear-
ing she would never see him again. Tempers on both sides were wearing
thin with the constant setbacks. Once out of Goodwin’s sight, Mary’s fiery
passion quickly subsided. By the time Goodwin found her, she was walk-
ing calmly in the garden. Incidents like this might have made Mary ques-
tion the benefits of their partnership, but, more importantly, they made
Goodwin fearful that Mary would desert him in the face of their continual
hardships.
Before Mr. Lawrence’s death, Mary had continued her cunning
craft. Her husband was not supportive of her vocation and sometimes did
her “the infamous injury of calling her a conjurer and saying she dealt
with the devil.” However, “her name quickly began on this account to be
famous.” She gave people advice under the cloak of astrology and engaged
in finding hidden treasure. At some point, she discontinued her practices
of “trading, doctoring, [and] obliging of people by resolving their doubts”
and made her living with the practice of alchemy.28 But after her hus-
band’s death, she lost her household in the Great Fire, and Prince Rupert
harassed her concerning her alchemical work, so she gave it up. It was at
that time that Thomas Parish proposed.
Mary had a rough time from her third husband as well. Thomas
Parish had known Mary since she was the young wife of Mr. Boucher. He
respected her many talents and virtues, but he tried to corrupt the very vir-
tue he admired by offering to give her a considerable income if she would
be his mistress. Mary’s continual refusals had just fueled his desire, and after
the death of Mr. Lawrence, the older man was determined to have her as
his wife. He made it clear that, as a widower from Suffolk with an estate
worth £1,200 per annum, he did not need any dowry or portion. Instead,
he offered to settle a modest jointure of £80 a year on Mary, which would
27. Ibid., 1:35.

28. Ibid., 1:33, 35, 41.

82 Chapter 5
come into effect upon his death. A jointure provided an income to a wife in
the event of widowhood. In the form of a legal contract, it usually related
to profits from land or an annuity. Like a modern-day prenuptial contract,
a jointure avoided lengthy litigation upon the death of the husband. For a
wealthy woman or an independent widow, it also served as an incentive to
marry. Mary did not offer the details of her jointure, but perhaps Parish
arranged for a guaranteed annuity for his future widow.29
So in 1669, less than a year after the death of her second husband,
Mr. Lawrence, the forty-year-old Mary agreed to marry Mr. Parish.30 She
told Goodwin that it was not for love or money. At the appointed time,
Mary and a few friends met her future spouse at Bromley St. Leonard’s
church, just outside the city walls east of the Tower. Thomas Parish arrived
from his home, six or seven miles farther east in the forest. After a brief
ceremony in the medieval church, the party returned to Parish’s house
for the nuptial feast. As Mr. Parish led his new bride through the door, his
housekeeper, Mrs. Bottom, appeared, saying “What! Have you brought
your whore with you?” This put an immediate damper on the celebrations.
Even those acquaintances of Mr. Parish who were not overly fond of Mary
were offended at such rudeness. Mary looked to her new husband, but all
he could offer was “Prithee, hold thy tongue!”31 Mary thought that the
servant should have been ordered from the room at the very least, but Mr.
Parish did not have the decency to even counterfeit being aggravated with
Bottom.
Mary could barely keep from weeping at the supper table and ate
nothing. She realized that she had sold herself to a man who did not
respect her. Just when Mary thought that the situation could not get any
worse, the “brazen fat housewife” came in again and, in front of all the
guests, announced that her master might go to bed when he pleased with
his new wife, but he should lie in the same sheets he had before, for she
would not lay clean ones for them to consummate the match. As house-
keeper, Mrs. Bottom was the only person who held a key to the linen cup-
board. Again, Mr. Parish’s response was apathetic: “Prithee, Bottom, let’s
29. Stretton, Women Waging Law in Elizabethan England, 27.

30. According to the parish register for Bromley St. Leonard, Thomas Parish of St. Paul Covent Gar-
den married Mary Lawrence of St. Sepulchre on June 17, 1669; LMA, Records for St. Mary, Bromley
St. Leonard [Microfilm X040/006B].

have clean sheets and don’t be so cross.”32 At this, Mary flew into a passion
and resolved to return to London immediately. While Parish tried to cajole
his difficult housekeeper into providing clean sheets, Mary’s friends tried to
convince her to be content with going to bed on foul sheets for the sake of
the jointure, which she would not enjoy if the marriage was not consum-
mated. They argued that leaving would be a scandal and everyone would
blame her for running out on her new husband, not taking into consider-
ation the extenuating circumstances. At length, they persuaded her to stay.
Mr. Parish had less success with Mrs. Bottom, so they went to the marriage
bed in dirty sheets. Needless to say, the “marital debt” was not paid with
interest. Under the circumstances, it is unlikely that there were any of the
common bedding practices of the time, such as singing lewd songs outside
the bedroom door or entering the bridal chamber to kiss the bride.33
The next morning, Mary was still resolved to leave, but now her
friends argued that it would be a scandal to leave after having bedded the
man. They convinced her that in time a strong-willed woman like herself
would get the upper hand and evict the troublesome housekeeper. They
suggested that the old man was weak and apt to be sickly, and would prob-
ably not live very long. So she put “her neck into the yoke” of despair and
resolved to bear the burden.34 Yet another testament to her perseverance
and patience.
Mary soon discovered that Mrs. Bottom had been merely a poor
washerwoman, but had slowly inveigled her way into a position of author-
ity in the Parish household. According to rumor, she had granted sexual
favors to one of Mr. Parish’s nephews in addition to the elder Parish. The
other servants thought she hoped to marry the master of the house her-
self. So now the “revengeful imperious illbred whore”35 was determined to
make the new Mrs. Parish’s life as miserable as possible. Mary was doubly
frustrated, having sacrificed her freedom for this impossible state of affairs.
As a widow, she could have enjoyed a comfortable life practicing physic
and cunning craft.
Although it was against her usually optimistic and cheerful dispo-
sition, Mary soon fell into a melancholic state. At first she begged her
32. Ibid.
33. Gillis, For Better, for Worse, 69.
35. Ibid.

84 Chapter 5
husband to relinquish his housekeeper, but he said he had promised Mrs.

Bottom that she would govern his household. Mary found the situation
deplorable; Parish would not even “keep [Mrs. Bottom] within the bounds
of civility.” Every day the situation grew worse, until Mary “was in a little
time brought to the pass as to set above in her chamber shut up, whilst
his whore (besides twenty more rovers I name not seldom a week without
some or other) set with him at table and [Mrs. Parish] should have sent up
to her what the governess whore thought fit, with a jeer perhaps for the
laugh. But all this being always insufferable, it being better to have been
sold a slave in Turkey.”36 Finally, after almost twelve months, Mary left her
husband to his lamentable lover and returned to London. She realized that
she risked condemnation for abandoning her husband, but she could not
tolerate the situation any longer. She began to set up her practice in physic,
which she had established while married to Boucher. She also requested
that her husband provide her with an allowance. Parish flatly refused, stat-
ing that she had a perfectly good home, if she chose to return to it.
Mary was wise enough not to sever all communication with her hus-
band. She remained amicable, and whenever it was convenient, she took
a coach out to visit him at his country house. He was a well-bred gentle-
man and not particularly prone to high passions, so there were no obvious
differences between them aside from the conflict over Mrs. Bottom. Mary
suspected that Bottom and Parish’s nephews were conniving to set Mr.
Parish at odds with his new wife because Mary was not beyond childbear-
ing years and might well conceive, if their relationship was more cordial.
If she did not give him an heir, his estate would fall to one of his nephews.
To counter any designs on her opponents’ side, Mary kept in favor
with the old man and sometimes met him in London. In anticipation of
one meeting, she prepared a special liquor that she told him was for the
benefit of his health. The potion boosted his carnal desires as well as his
procreative faculty. She also augmented his emotional faculty for love with
a frog bone charm, similar to the one she later fabricated with Goodwin.
She discreetly touched the bone to her husband’s hand and then drew her
hand toward herself in a gesture intended to harness his love and affection.
She also counterfeited resistance to his amorous advances, a trick she knew
would increase his passion. Her plan worked, and she soon proved to be
36. Ibid.

with child. At first she kept the knowledge to herself, but she thought it best
to tell her husband sooner rather than later. Of course, he was overjoyed
about the possibility of an heir.
When the nephews and Mrs. Bottom found out about the preg-
nancy, they contrived to make Parish jealous and, more crucially, to cast
doubt on the paternity of the child. One of the nephews lurked around
Covent Garden watching for an opportunity to “accidentally” run into
Mary on the street. When at length he did, he appeared overjoyed at their
chance meeting and invited her to join him for a glass of wine at the Cross
Keys tavern on the north side of Bedford Street where it meets Henrietta.
He professed that he had something to tell her. She was eager to remain
friendly with the family, especially considering her pregnancy, and agreed
to accompany him to the tavern. He hired a private room upstairs, where
he said they could talk undisturbed. She went ahead while he ordered
the wine. Unknown to her, he pulled aside the tapster and instructed him
not to come upstairs regardless of what he heard. After the tapster had
brought the wine, the nephew shut the door ominously.
Out of the blue, the young man launched into an amorous speech
about how he was in love with Mary “above all the women in the world.”
Although he was the kinder of the two nephews, Mary never had any rea-
son to suspect he loved her. She calmly explained that it was vain to tempt
her to be dishonest to her husband. Even though they did not cohabit,
she was still his wife in the eyes of God, as well as in the eyes of the law.
Despite her refusal, he told her “plainly he must and would lie with her,
upon which beginning to struggle with her, she begins to stamp & howl
and cry out, but all to no purpose, for nobody came up: which she per-
ceiving, & having no other remedy, she takes the pots and bottles upon
the table and what came next to hand and threw them through the glass
windows, all which together with the glass made such a rattling, that the
master of the house (not engag’d in the plot) in a great rage ran up.”37 The
nephew promised to pay for the damages and the innkeeper was pacified.
The young man begged Mary not to tell his uncle, who was his bread and
butter. Mary had always been too quick to forgive and agreed never to
speak of the incident to her husband on the condition that it would not be
repeated. This pardon turned out to be a mistake. Although the nephew
37. Ibid, 1:49.

86 Chapter 5
had not been successful in raping her, he had managed to damage her
reputation, which was, of course, the purpose of his actions. The story was
distorted to cast doubt on her honesty—what occasion did she have to be
alone with the nephew in a tavern? Mr. Parish was so overwhelmed with
this and other tales that he declared that he would not recognize the child
as his own blood.
As the time grew near for Mary’s lying-in, Mr. Parish came to her
and declared that the only way he would accept paternity was if she were
brought to bed at the very day and hour that he reckoned she was due. She
argued that no woman in the world ever kept to the very day and hour,
but he would not listen to reason. When the pangs of childbirth began, she
sent news to her husband. As soon as the message was delivered, he pulled
out his almanac and checked the dates. According to his calculations, the
time was correct to the very hour, and he accepted the child as his own.
Mary attributed this small miracle to God’s answer to her prayers, another
testament of her positive relationship with the divine. When the midwife
announced the arrival of a boy child, Parish went to the Old Exchange by
St. Paul’s Cathedral and bought up as much linen and other provisions as
if he were outfitting a prince. By mutual consent, the boy, who was chris-
tened Thomas after his father, was sent to a wet nurse until he was strong
enough for a long journey. The infant (and possibly his wet nurse) were
conveyed to Paris to be raised by another uncle of Mary. This was prefer-
able to having the boy raised by Mrs. Bottom.
After the birth of her son, Mary continued to live on her own. She
offered to return to her husband’s house on many occasions, on the condi-
tion that Bottom was not held above her. She made it clear that she did not
care how many other women her husband dealt with, including Bottom, but
that she did not want them in the house or in her sight. But Parish preferred
to uphold his promise to let Mrs. Bottom govern the household rather than
honor his legal or moral obligations to his wife. And as long as Mary lived
separate from him, he would not provide her with so much as a farthing for
her upkeep. This constant frustration prompted her to pursue the matter
legally. The Church of England did not allow divorce, but several lawyers
advised her that she had the right to sue for separate maintenance. As Mary
had sufficient funds for a lawyer, she began a civil suit for alimony, which
was becoming increasingly common by the mid-seventeenth century. But
she would have to prove that Bottom was more than a housekeeper. So she
paid a visit to Parish’s house and was very civil to one and all as she waited

for her chance to be alone. Mrs. Bottom had her bed in the same chamber
as Mr. Parish, on the pretense that he was old and infirm and might need
assistance in the night. Mary suspected that Bottom never lay in her own
bed, so she took a great pair of silver candlesticks from the dining room and
hid them in the bedding on Mrs. Bottom’s bed. Since Bottom held the keys
for the linen cupboard, none of the other servants had reason to meddle
with her bed, which made Bottom confident no one would realize that she
never slept there. But it was also the reason Mary knew her trick would not
be discovered. The candlesticks were missed immediately, but the household
suspected that Mary had taken them away to pawn them. She had done this
on a previous occasion, when she was in dire need of funds, but had eventu-
ally redeemed them and returned them to her husband. Since the alimony
suit was already in progress, Mr. Parish did not make a fuss, thinking he
could use this act as evidence against his wife’s character.
At length the case was heard. The seventeenth-century legal system
was very complex and jurisdictions frequently overlapped. Mary does not
offer details about which court judged her case. Consistory courts were
ecclesiastical courts that generally heard complaints from couples who
were in dispute over the details of marital breakdowns. However, settle-
ment disputes involving couples who had previously obtained a separation
of “bed and board” from the ecclesiastical courts were commonly heard in
the equity court of Chancery, a secular court concerned with disputes over
such things as inheritance, trusts, and marriage settlements.38 Alternatively,
some magistrates negotiated separation agreements outside the courts,
passing judgment from their private chambers in Doctors’ Commons, near
St. Paul’s Cathedral.39 Mary stated that the presiding judge in her case
was Sir Thomas Twisden, who acted as justice of the King’s Bench at that
time.40 Although the King’s Bench had jurisdiction over civil cases under
the “Plea Side,” it was better known for its role in criminal cases. Twisden,
however, was sometimes commissioned to judge cases heard in the Sheriff ’s
and Mayor’s Courts of London as well.
Whatever the venue, Mary’s counsel argued that Mr. Parish lived
scandalously with his housekeeper and that the situation was unbearable
38. Lemmings, “Women’s Property, Popular Cultures, and the Consistory Court of London,” 68.
39. Stretton, “Marriage, Separation and the Common Law in England,” 21, 23, 29, 30.
40. In 1660 Twisden was knighted and appointed as a justice of the King’s Bench. He ceased active
service as a judge in 1678. Paul D. Halliday, “Sir Thomas Twisden (1602–1683),” DNB.

88 Chapter 5
to his wife. The counsel for Mr. Parish argued that his wife refused to live
with him, and also laid the charge against her of the theft of the candle-
sticks. As Mary had anticipated, Mr. Parish denied that Mrs. Bottom was
his mistress but admitted that they lay in the same chamber because of
his infirmities. Mary then played what she thought was her trump card.
She requested that the court go to Parish’s house and examine Bottom’s
bed. At this, the crowd in the courtroom fell to laughing. Mr. Parish and
his counsel were dumbfounded, and the judges sat in silence. But while
the crowd jeered, Mr. Parish had time to collect his wits. At that point,
he admitted that the candlesticks were there, but said that Mrs. Bottom
removed them every night before going to bed and replaced them in the
morning. Old Judge Twisden, being no different from most men of his
time, had no sympathy for the plight of women. “Aye,” he said, “this is
a very fine thing indeed that we old cuckolds must allow our wives ali-
mony, and yet they go away from us.”41 And so the case went against her.
Mary was so enraged that she once again used the frog bone. This time
she touched Parish with the right-side bone, pushing her hand away in a
gesture of refusal, which caused Parish to develop an aversion against her
that lasted until his death in June of 1683.42
So by the time she met Goodwin in February 1683, Mary had been
a wife three times and a mother many times over. At thirteen or fourteen
years old, she married Mr. Boucher, with whom she had seven daughters;
while in debtor’s prison for Boucher’s debts, she married Mr. Lawrence,
with whom she had fourteen more girl babies; and she gave birth to one
son with her last husband Thomas Parish. When Goodwin met Mary, only
two of her daughters and her one son were still alive. One daughter (pre-
sumably one of Boucher’s) was married to a gentleman in Cornwall, and
another girl and the boy were in the guardianship of her father’s younger
brother, John Tompson.
Mary’s claim of birthing twenty- two children is questionable.
Granted, it was not uncommon for women from the upper levels of society
to be pregnant for most of their fertile years. Elizabeth Clinton, the Count-
ess of Lincoln, who wrote a treatise urging women to breast-feed their
own children (although she hadn’t), claimed that she had eighteen live

42. There is no burial record for Thomas Parish in LMA, Parish Records for St. Mary, Bromley St.
Leonard, in 1683.

births.43 And Frances Crockford of Minehead, Somerset, bore eighteen

children in twenty-six years, which included only one set of twins.44 So the
birth of twenty-two children is not unheard of, especially considering that
Mary was married so young. Did Mary have several sets of twins? Does
“having children” mean delivering a full-term baby? Or was she pregnant
twenty-two times, resulting in some live births, some stillbirths, and some
miscarriages? Did Mary perhaps include Lawrence’s children from his first
marriage in this count? Mary’s claim to have had twenty-two children may
be an example of her embellishing the story of her earlier life. But to what
purpose? To demonstrate her fertility? To garner sympathy? Or was she
preparing her audience for the rampant fertility yet to come? And what
became of all these children?
According to Mary, fourteen of her children had died during the
last outbreak of the plague to hit London.45 At that time, Mary was
married to Mr. Lawrence, who was away at sea. The symptoms of rag-
ing fever, shuddering cold, frequent vomiting, and dizziness were first
reported in the squalid parish of St. Giles-in-the-Fields. Black buboes
appeared on the lymph nodes in the thighs and armpits before the victims
died a painful death. Public fires were lit on every street in an attempt to
purify the poisonous air. More than two thousand bodies were dumped
in “plague-holes” every night. In most cases, no one even bothered to
record the names in the parish records. This would explain why there
is no record of the burial of Mary’s children in St. Sepulchre-without-
Newgate parish.
While Mary was still reeling from the loss of her daughters, London
was assaulted by fire.46 The year of 1666 had been a time of drought, and
the crowded wooden buildings were tinder-dry. The fire started in a bakery
just east of London Bridge and quickly spread west along the riverfront,
prohibiting access to the water from the Thames. Survivors reported that
the sun rose that morning as red as blood. Mary may have lived in the par-
ish of St. Sepulchre at the time, just west of Newgate. She probably packed
a few belongings and took her family to the nearest safe house. Eventually
43. Clinton, Countesse of Lincolnes Nurserie, 18; Betty S. Travitsky, “Clinton [née Knevitt], Elizabeth,
countess of Lincoln (1574?–1630?),” DNB.
44. McLaren, “Nature’s Contraceptive,” 429.
45. Details of the plague epidemic are drawn from Houlbrooke, Death, Religion and the Family in England;
Moote and Moote, Great Plague.
46. Details of the fire are drawn from Bedford, London’s Burning; Tinniswood, By Permission of Heaven.

90 Chapter 5
thousands of homeless victims camped in Moorfields, north of the city

wall. Over thirty thousand homes were reduced to charred debris. Mary
told Goodwin that she lost almost everything.
More losses were yet to come. Not long after the fire, Mary’s Uncle
John took one of her surviving daughters from her marriage to Lawrence,
while the child was still with a wet nurse. Mary made it plain that she
would have gladly delivered the child to him to raise (as she had been), if
only he had asked. He replied that he did not care how he got the child, but
he would keep her, no matter what she thought. In the end, she resigned
herself to the situation. By the time Mary met Goodwin, the daughter in
question was a grown woman and married to Sir William Pen, “a gentle-
man of good estate.”47 She had several children of her own and felt that
she was above her mother’s station.
Uncle John also managed to get ahold of her son. When Parish
was on his deathbed in June 1683, he sent for both Mary and their son,
Thomas. At first the boy did not know his mother. He had been raised
in France, and mother and son were unable to communicate. When he
perceived the truth, he laid his hand on her head and cried “Ah, pauvre
femme!”48 The next morning, Mary returned with a man who spoke
French, who explained to the boy the circumstances of his birth. The
young man seemed very pleased and complained that in the past he had
been told either that Mrs. Bottom was his mother or that his mother was
dead.49 But Mary did not enjoy her son’s company for long. Uncle John
soon arrived on the scene and insisted that he become the boy’s legal
guardian. No doubt he had an eye on Thomas Parish’s estate, to which
the boy would be sole heir. Since Mary was in no position to act as guard-
ian to Thomas, even if her son wanted to live with her, the boy went into
the country, where he disappeared from Mary’s narrative. The fate of
her remaining children is just one more of many mysteries concerning
Mary’s life.

48. Ibid.
49. This is one of many situations in Mary’s life that are left unexplained. Mary told Goodwin that
her son was sent to Paris to be raised by a rich uncle of hers. But the boy makes it sound as if it was
his father’s relatives that did not want him to know who his true mother was. Why would Mary’s uncle
not tell the child the truth?

Chapter 6
Sex and Succession

In June of 1683, Mary’s husband, Thomas Parish, came to her in spirit
while she slept and “looked a pretty while upon her.”1 In the morning,
she got confirmation that he was dead, and she was once again a widow.
Perhaps not coincidentally, the king of the Lowlanders died a month later,
on July 24. In June, when Mary and Goodwin were trying to arrange a
meeting with the Lowlanders, the king and queen had been at Rye, say-
ing goodbye to the queen’s relatives. When the Lowlanders finally arrived
home, the king was exhausted from his excessive drinking and debilitating
bouts of vomiting. By mid-July he had grown worse, and twelve of his best
physicians could not relieve his fever. Even Mary and Goodwin’s efforts at
physic were not effective. As you can imagine, the Lowlander court was in
chaos. For someone of his importance, Mosaic law required thirty days of
mourning (Deut. 34:8). Then the king’s body was to be taken to Cornwall
for burial with his ancestors. In the meantime, the queen refused to enter-
tain any Uplanders until the kingdom was settled once again.
This unfortunate turn of events caused Goodwin great vexation.
Whenever the couple visited Hounslow to meet with the Lowlanders, they
frequented the same little inn, east of the parish church where the Red
Lion Hotel now stands.2 They rented the quietest room available, which
was furnished with two beds. They had agreed that in a place where there
were many people about, it would be more convenient to lodge together.
Not only would they be able to converse freely, but if George came to

2. Clark, Goodwin Wharton, 336.
91

92 Chapter 6
Mary in the night, she could awaken Goodwin without wandering through
the halls at unseemly hours. Because of the great difference in their ages—
Mary was fifty-three and Goodwin was thirty—in addition to their per-
fectly innocent thoughts, they did not fear any scandal.
After learning of the king’s death, Goodwin “walked up and down
the room without [his] clothes.” This probably does not mean that he was
naked. It could mean that he was wearing a bed shirt, but since they were
traveling, it more likely refers to the voluminous linen shirt and breeches
that men typically wore as undergarments beneath their day clothes. Mary
was already in her bed, probably the typical four-sided box bed of the era,
enclosed with floor-length curtains hanging from a tester, which could be
drawn for warmth and privacy. She urged Goodwin to stop his fretting
and go to his bed, but he refused. To pacify him (so that she could get
some sleep), she said, “You will certainly catch your death. If you must
talk, rather than set up, thus cover yourself with this rug.”3 She held up the
top bed covering, and Goodwin lay down beside her. Goodwin had never
shown any previous signs of sexual attraction to Mary, so the intimacy of
the situation did not concern her. Given Mary’s age, her recent broken leg,
and her constant brandy drinking, it is unlikely that she was the portrait of
a fair, young maiden. Nevertheless, Mary consistently constructed herself
as a gentlewoman and, despite the couple’s financial difficulties, she no
doubt dressed respectably. When the couple was resident in London, she
employed a maid, and she kept a small lapdog like the fashionable gentry
women of the day. And there must have been sufficient evidence of her
beauty as a young woman for Goodwin to accept that aspect of her story.
Mary was probably oblivious to the fact that her constant com-
panionship impeded Goodwin from having sexual relations with other
women. But when he threw back the bedclothes and proceeded to
initiate intercourse, she was forced to rethink the situation. Granted,
she was now a widow and free from any marital obligations . . . and
physical intimacy might make Goodwin more loyal to their partner-
ship . . . and he was a young, handsome man of good breeding. On
the other hand, she was old enough to be his mother . . . the differ-
ence in their social status would prohibit a marriage . . . and her
reputation as a virtuous woman had never been corrupted by sexual

Sex and Succession 93
misadventures outside the institution of matrimony (at least that’s the

story she told Goodwin). By the time she pondered all of these consider-
ations, she was dangerously close to being “absolutely in [his] power.”4 She
asked him to stop, and being a gentleman, he did.
In the light of morning, Mary felt she needed a second opinion on
this new development in their relationship. She summoned the elderly
Father Fryar, who probably represented a sort of father figure for her in
the absence of her own father. He could also offer advice grounded in
Catholic doctrine. The friar believed that Mary and Goodwin had done
violence to Nature by denying their passion. He assured Mary that if they
kept true to each other, their intimate relationship would not offend God.
So that night, Mary once again invited Goodwin into her bed. And the
night after that. Mary’s alternate realm allowed her to circumvent the con-
straints of her society.
Although marriages between older widows and younger men were
not unheard of, they were relatively rare. Sometimes a widow was viewed
as a profitable marriage partner, as Mary was when she was the widow of
tailor Boucher. But a widow had an ambiguous reputation, on account
of her previous sexual experience, combined with the independence of
living unsupervised by a man. The anxieties surrounding widows’ sexual-
ities were widely expressed in ballads and broadsheets.5 But in Mary and
Goodwin’s case, the inequality in their social status was probably more of
a concern than marital status or age difference.
A greater worry was that whenever Goodwin was “concerned” with
Mary (as he delicately phrased it), he experienced a great pain and weak-
ness in his back, which was unusual for a strong, young man. His sore back
had originated with his heroic effort to catch Mary when she toppled from
a horse while they were looking for hazel wands. But instead of improving
over time, the injury was deteriorating. Mary suspected that Goodwin’s
discomfort was on account of sexual interference from the spirit realm.
What if one of the Lowlander women was visiting Goodwin at night like
a succubus?
A succubus was a demon in the form of a woman, which seduced
or raped a man in his sleep. The male version was called an incubus. The
concept of female fairies as succubi who “tryst with men” was part of the
4. Ibid.
5. Gowing, Domestic Dangers, 68, 158, 214.

94 Chapter 6
demonization of the fairy realm, which took place during the witchcraft
prosecution era (1550–1660).6 In popular culture, the idea of the lustful
fairy queen who desired sexual liaisons with human men was well devel-
oped. Shakespeare humorously exploited this trope in Midsummer Night’s
Dream (1594–96). The character Bottom, after metamorphosing into an ass,
became the object of affection for Titania, the queen of the fairies. The ele-
ment of human greed, which could turn this concept into an opportunity
for a scam, was made famous in Ben Jonson’s satire The Alchemist (1610).
The character Dapper, who, like Goodwin, initially approached a cunning
person for help in gambling, was promised the favor of the fairy queen.
The literary scholar C. J. Sisson suggests that the character of Dapper was
based on an actual incident recorded in the Chancery archives, Rogers v.
Rogers (1609–10), in which Thomas Rogers of Hinton was promised to be
married to the fairy queen in return for five or six pounds of gold.7
Goodwin’s bad back is an example of how a situation that could
easily be taken at face value was often interpreted in light of the couple’s
involvement with the spirit realm. As in the case of the many witchcraft
accusations of the previous century, the obsession with the supernatural
distorted people’s perceptions. Simple mischance was construed as a pur-
poseful event orchestrated by outside forces.8 On one occasion, smoke filled
the couple’s lodgings. The landlady’s kitchen was immediately below the
room, and the smoke had “a sweet odiferous smell.”9 However, rather than
understanding the cloud of smoke as a dangerous kitchen fire, Goodwin
and Mary preferred to view it as a great miracle and a sign from God. On
another occasion, Goodwin was sitting in a tavern drinking a glass of wine
when it suddenly slipped from his hand and broke. This commonplace
mishap was understood as an attack by an evil spirit, which had wrenched
the glass from his hand out of malice.
In the case of Goodwin’s back pain, the Lowlanders were the sus-
pected culprits. The sexual nature of the Lowlanders had already been
established in Mary’s anecdote about the king desiring to have a child with
her. George soon confirmed that it was the queen herself who was coming
to Goodwin’s bed. Apparently, she had fallen in love with Goodwin the
6. Kirk, Secret Commonwealth of Elves, 25.

7. Sisson, “A Topical Reference in The Alchemist,” 740–41; TNA, C 3/288/39, Rogers v. Rogers.
8. Demos, Entertaining Satan, 191.

first moment she had seen him sleeping in his room at the Temple. She had
started her sexual indiscretions in June after the floodwaters had abated at
Hounslow, even before the death of the king (and before Mary’s intimacy
with Goodwin). Her lust for him was so excessive that on the last occasion
she had drawn up her breath at the very moment of their mutual climax,
which had extracted Goodwin’s vital energy from his marrow.10 The idea
of vital energy being associated with the marrow can be traced back to
ancient authors such as Plato. They viewed sperm as a special type of
marrow that descended from the brain down the spine to the genitals. The
marrow was linked spiritually to the brain and heart. This idea continued
in medieval medical treatises. Pleasure arose from the marrow as a wind
that entered the testicles and inflated the penis, thereby fueling desire in
the blood.11
Mary was not surprised by this turn of events. The queen had told
her, while the king still lived, that she had a great desire to have a child.
Because the Lowlanders lived underground in a colder, damper climate,
they were of a colder nature, which, according to contemporary medical
theories, made conception more difficult. Lowlanders had few children
among themselves and often sought out sexual partners from among the
Uplanders, who were of a hotter nature and therefore more fertile.12 The
queen confided in Mary that she had previously conducted a secret affair
with an Uplander in hopes of producing an heir, but had been unsuccessful.
Goodwin was outraged by the queen’s advances, which he consid-
ered “the worse sort of ravishing.”13 In the end he forgave her, knowing that
a woman’s passion was not easily contained. Goodwin’s male ego was, no
doubt, assuaged by the fact that the queen told Mary that she had found
herself all in a rapture and could not get enough satisfaction with Good-
win, something which she had never experienced during her previous sex-
ual encounters. The king was old and decayed (like Mary’s first husband,
the old tailor Boucher), and the queen reported that the Uplander, Mr. Gif-
ford, had pulled her about roughly (reminiscent of Mary’s second husband,
10. Curiously, a similar understanding exists in Eastern medicine based on energy meridians. A web
of meridians connects the vital organs and acts as energy sources for the body. Sexual energy moves
from the crown of the head to the genitals through a series of seven chakras. See Anand, Art of Sexual
Magic, 201.
11. Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages, 14, 84–86.
12. Refer to the discussion on humoral theory in chapter 2.

96 Chapter 6
the abusive Mr. Lawrence), which she had endured for the sake of a child.
On one occasion, the queen had even “continued lying with [Goodwin],
3 times without ever quitting [him],” which was a testament to his sexual
stamina.14 Goodwin accepted the queen’s assurances that it wouldn’t hap-
pen again and contented himself with a treatment of yarrow, milk, and
sugar taken every morning for nine days to address the back pain. More
importantly, all could be forgiven now that the queen was a widow and was
free to marry Goodwin. She promised to bring him into her kingdom as
king of the Lowlanders. The queen’s association with Goodwin mirrored
Mary’s relationship with him, shifting into a romantic liaison.
Not surprisingly, other Lowlander women were also taking a sexual
interest in Goodwin. Father Fryar’s daughter had ravished him on a hun-
dred occasions. And, more importantly, the queen’s younger sister, Princess
Ursula La Gard, had fallen in love with him from the moment she saw him
playing the recorder in his room. The princess had come over from Italy
when the king first fell ill in July. According to Mary, Ursula was the most
beautiful woman she had ever seen, wearing so many jewels that Mary
could hardly look upon her for the sparkling reflection. The queen had
always been jealous of her younger sister, on account of Ursula’s youth and
beauty. The princess cautioned Mary that the queen’s jealousy would soon
extend to Mary as well. She astutely forewarned Mary that the queen was
a very cunning woman, full of tricks and bad humors, who would not deal
justly with the couple. As a solution, the princess offered to marry Goodwin
immediately and teach him all of the Lowlanders’ arts (just as Mary was
teaching Goodwin magical arts?). She pointed out that she was young for a
Lowlander, being but fifty years old (approximately the same age as Mary),
and could bear him a child, whereas her sister was almost three hundred
years old and past the normal age of reproduction. Although Goodwin
was flattered by this generous offer, he did not wish to disoblige the queen,
whom he had promised to meet before he saw any other Lowlander. This
romantic affaire de coeur would be the beginning of a long rivalry for Good-
win’s affections. For a long time, it served to distract Goodwin from any
other female Uplander relationships, which were more threatening to Mary.
Near the end of September, the queen was returning from an outing
to a Lowlander colony situated below Shirburn Castle near Watlington,
14. Ibid., 1:96.

Oxford. On the way home, her coach overturned while going down a steep
hill between Henley and Maidenhead. The queen, quite “frighted, & very
sick, was flown away straight home.” She immediately fell “exceedingly ill”
from her fright.15 But this time it was not her monthly period: the queen,
in violent pain and misery, miscarried a boy child—Goodwin’s son. After
the birth, she continued to suffer from violent pains in her head and a
great deal of pain in her lower back. In mid-October she miscarried the
barely formed fetus of a second boy child, which was delivered to Mary
and Goodwin in a basin of warm water. (One must pause and wonder at
Mary’s resourcefulness.) After the second miscarriage, the queen contin-
ued in severe pain and a raging fever. She swore that if she died, the keys
to the kingdom at Hounslow were to be given to Goodwin. With the aid of
physic from Mary and Goodwin, the queen was fully recovered by the end
of November. A further thirty-three days of purification, in accordance
with Mosaic law (Lev. 12:1–4), stole away all of December 1683.
The excuse of menstruation and postpartum bleeding not only
prohibited Goodwin from meeting and marrying the queen, but also
inadvertently interfered with his potential relationship with the princess.
The queen’s meeting with Goodwin had been delayed for so long that in
January of 1684 she was determined to see him despite being “ill.” But
the princess somehow discovered the queen’s plan, which was in defiance
of their Mosaic laws. Since it was a matter of religion, the princess told
the Lowlander pope, who confronted the queen. When the queen denied
the accusation, the pope sent for an Uplander midwife to examine her,
supposedly because she would be impartial. But by the time the midwife
arrived, the queen’s courses had stopped; the fright from the pope’s verbal
attack had caused her blood to be diverted to her heart. This turn of events
shifted accusations from the queen to the princess, who was placed under
house arrest for making false allegations. The queen was determined that
the princess should remain confined in her own apartment until after
Goodwin had visited the court. She was destined to remain imprisoned for
the next two years.
Goodwin’s triumphal entry into the realm of the Lowlanders to take
his place as king was further delayed in the first months of 1685, as Mary
and Goodwin turned their attention to other matters. In July of 1685, the
15. Ibid., 1:101.

98 Chapter 6
queen promised to come to Goodwin at his lodgings in London, which,

by this time, he shared with Mary. The couple maintained separate sleep-
ing chambers for appearance’s sake, but Goodwin spent most nights in
Mary’s bed. On the night of the planned visit, Mary and Goodwin had
quarreled over their constant trials and tribulations. Goodwin decided to
go to Mary’s bed to cajole her out of her ill humor and then return to his
own bed before the queen arrived. But, as luck would have it, he fell asleep
at Mary’s side. The queen, finding them together, became enraged. The
queen’s jealousy continued to escalate during the subsequent months. She
demanded that Goodwin promise never to be “concerned” with Mary any
more, as she could not suffer the sight of her. Mary unselfishly offered to
stop having sexual relations with Goodwin if it would appease the queen
and further Goodwin’s interests. She protested that it was ridiculous for
someone like Goodwin, who was destined to such greatness, to have an
old woman like her for a partner. But in spite of these selfless propositions,
Mary was jealous of the queen. By talking in her sleep, Mary revealed that
even though she was the one brokering the marriage between Goodwin
and the queen, she was sick at heart at the thought of seeing him in her
arms.
The jealousy that played out between Mary and the queen became
the fulcrum point for a shift in attention from the queen to the princess. By
March of 1686, Mary expressed her preference for Goodwin to marry the
princess. Other entities from the spirit world also confirmed that Goodwin
should come into the Lowlander realm via the princess rather than the
queen. In June 1686, the queen died of a “heart sickness,” but not before
proclaiming that Goodwin was the rightful heir to the throne as her lawful
husband (even though they hadn’t been lawfully married). She also made
him sole heir of all her riches. The princess, who succeeded as the new
queen, heartily agreed to marry Goodwin and bring him into his rightful
realm. Interestingly, the succession of the Lowlander monarchy was pre-
scient to the situation in England following the death of the childless King
William and Queen Mary. Mary’s younger sister Anne came to the throne
in 1702.
Not surprisingly, the same pattern of delays emerged concern-
ing meeting the princess as had existed with the queen. First, there was
mourning for the queen and later the pope, who also died; then there were
ongoing issues with menstruation; and throughout, there was a tangled
and tedious web of Lowlander court politics. There were even concerns

expressed about consanguinity, since Goodwin had been allegedly mar-

ried to the princess’s sister, which echoes issues concerning Henry VIII’s
marriage to Catherine of Aragon, his brother’s widow. Within a month
of the queen’s death, Goodwin was dreading the thought of being tied to
the princess, whose temperament was even more fickle and vicious than
her sister’s had been. He soon came to understand that the princess was
largely to blame for the former delays in meeting the queen. And the worst
of his suspicions were confirmed when he discovered that the princess had
visited him in the dead of night, “effecting carnal copulation” with him
while he slept.16 Eventually, the princess retreated to Italy to avoid political
problems in her realm at Hounslow. In the fall of 1686, she grew ill and
died the following June. After four years of constant delays and frustra-
tions, Goodwin had not met a single Lowlander.
But it would take more than a few minor setbacks to deter Goodwin
from entering into his rightful kingdom. In the absence of both the queen
and the princess, the Duchess of Plymouth came forward to support his
claim as monarch. A backache was once again the clue to the Lowlander’s
interest in Goodwin. The duchess had lain with him the night before, and
she had become impregnated by him on a previous occasion. Goodwin, as
usual, was alarmed by this behavior and performed some sort of love magic
involving herbs to bind the duchess from engaging in any more nighttime
excursions. When she attempted once again to have her way with him,
Goodwin caught hold of her in his sleep and pulled her under him, with
the intention of having intercourse. Apparently, it wasn’t the sex that was
offensive, but his lack of control in the act. But she requested a moment
to catch her breath and took the opportunity to roll out from under him
“like a roll of cloak.”17 A couple of days later, the duchess returned to
Goodwin’s chamber and allowed him to have a glimpse of her; in his half
slumber, Goodwin mistook her for Mary. One can see how the belief in the
spirit world, combined with the power of suggestion, was a heady brew.
And harnessing the imagination was an integral part of magic, at which
Mary was particularly adept.
16. Ibid., 1:305.

17. Ibid., 2:72.

Chapter 7
The Pleasures of Venus

and the Pains of Eve
In addition to causing jealousy with the Lowlander women and more sur-
prising than the difference in their ages and social status, Mary and Good-
win’s new sexual relationship had another consequence: Mary conceived
a child from their union. During the first few months following their initial
meeting in March of 1683, Mary had slowly recovered from her broken
leg and started eating regularly. Goodwin reported that she grew “fat &
heavy.”1 Luckily, this enabled her to hide her illicit pregnancy. As an expe-
rienced mother, Mary claimed that she knew immediately when she was
pregnant. How did she know? According to the seventeenth-century phy-
sician Helkiah Crooke, a woman conceived during coitus if “there runneth
a chilnesse or light horror through her whole body; or if she perceiue her
womb to contract it selfe; if she receiue the seede of man with delight and
it yssue not from her againe.”2 So every sexual encounter ending in orgasm
resulted in conception!
Aside from knowing immediately that she was pregnant, there was
the issue of Mary’s age. At fifty-three, Mary should have been past the
time of childbearing. There were varying opinions in the seventeenth cen-
tury concerning the normal age of menopause and, no doubt, individual
variances. Contemporary midwife Jane Sharp stated that menstruation
usually ceased at age fifty, but she admitted that a strong woman could

2. Crooke, Mikrokosmographia, question 22, p. 314.
100

The Pleasures of Venus and the Pains of Eve 101
still produce enough good blood to menstruate until almost sixty years
old.3 The fictional character Moll Flanders stated that the age of forty-
eight was the “time for me to leave bearing children.”4 Presumably, Defoe
based this statement on general opinion of the time. The seventeenth-
century physician Helkiah Crooke argued that “women at sixtie years old
haue no surplusage of blood and therefore their courses faile; yet they con-
tinue to procreate seede euen to their extreme age, which also in coition
they auoyde, which though at that age it be not fit for generation, yet is it
sufficient to prouoke pleasure.”5 Indeed, Elizabeth Greenhill (mother of
the surgeon and author Thomas Greenhill) allegedly gave birth to thirty-
nine children (only one set of which were twins), which would indicate an
advanced age during her last few pregnancies.6
But Mary’s age was the least of it. As if proving fertile at the age
of fifty-three weren’t astonishing enough, Mary conceived a second child
three days later. The modern reader might see this as another example
of Goodwin’s gullibility, but according to early modern medical under-
standing, a process called “superfetation” explained how a woman could
conceive again several days or even a month after an initial conception.7
Here again, sexual satisfaction was at the heart of the issue. The medical
profession generally accepted that “the Womb be usually exactly shut and
close, when a Woman has Conceived,” but contemporary authors agreed
that “the pleasures of Venus will open the womb at any time” . . . “espe-
cially when a Woman is much delighted in the act of Copulation,” allow-
ing for subsequent conceptions. Not surprisingly, this “inordinate lust” was
associated with Eve.8 In such a case, the bottom of the womb was “dilated
and opened by the impetuous Endeavours of the Seed, agitated and over-
heated more than ordinary.”9 A woman could even miscarry one of the
children and still carry the other one to full term. Suspected cases of super-
fetation were reported as late as the twentieth century.10
3. Sharp, Midwives Book, bk. 2, chap. 1, p. 84.

4. Defoe, Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, 207.
5. Crooke, Mikrokosmographia, 314.
6. Bannerman, Miscellanea Genealogica et Heraldica, vol. 5, 3rd ser.; L. A. F. Davidson, “Thomas Greenhill
(fl. 1698–1732),” DNB.
7. Sharp, Midwives Book, 70–72; McMath, Expert Midwife, 11; Eccles, Obstetrics and Gynaecology in Tudor
and Stuart England, 40; Moncrief and McPherson, Performing Maternity in Early Modern England, 45–58.
8. Pechey, General Treatise of the Diseases of Maids . . . , 78–79; Sharp, Midwives Book, 59–60. See Genesis
4:2 concerning the birth of Cain and Abel, which is sometimes interpreted as superfetation.
9. Mauriceau, Diseases of Women with Child, bk. 1, chap. 8, p. 42.
10. Long, “Case of Superfetation with Complications.”

102 Chapter 7
What purpose did a narrative of multiple pregnancies serve? Later,

we will discover that the state of pregnancy facilitated Mary’s ability to
communicate with the angels. But a single fetus would have sufficed for
that purpose. And besides, the angel with whom she communicated the
most came to her when she was not pregnant. Based on contemporary
medical theories, multiple conceptions demonstrated Mary’s intense pas-
sion for Goodwin (interpreted as love and dedication) and must have rein-
forced Goodwin’s self-image as an ardent lover. In any case, Goodwin was
too overjoyed at the prospect of two sons (George confirmed the sex of the
children) to question the gynecological details.
In the spring of 1684, as Mary’s lying-in time drew near, she and
Goodwin planned how she could deliver the babies without raising sus-
picions. Not only was she pregnant out of wedlock, which was socially
shameful, but they were trying to keep the nature of their relationship
secret from Goodwin’s family. At this time, Mary was living in the same
busy lodging as Goodwin, but in a separate room. Although illicit relations
were common in such rooming houses, Goodwin kept up the façade of
propriety by sneaking up the stairs every evening to Mary’s room with his
pillow in hand and returning to his own room early in the morning. To
avoid prying eyes, Goodwin rented another lodging in the Covent Garden
area where Mary was supposed to join him just before her time. But, as
luck would have it, Mary went into labor a few days ahead of schedule.
Goodwin was at the new location in Covent Garden and Mary was in their
usual lodging. Goodwin had left some money in the desk drawer of Mary’s
room, but it was locked and she couldn’t break it open. So she gathered
together some linens and pawned them for six shillings, which would cover
the typical fee for a midwife in London, which was normally between five
and ten shillings.11 She also paid a visit to a man on Old Fish Street, who
owed her fifteen shillings. Then she proceeded to a midwife in Long Lane
where she was delivered of two boys in less than an hour. One of the babies
was sickly, and a minister was called in to christen him Charles before he
died. Although baby Charles was buried with “all things whatever fitting,”
the Lowlander queen thought that a child of Goodwin’s deserved better.12
11. Fees could range from a few pennies for very poor women up to four to eight pounds for wealthier
clients; Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death, 73; Evenden, Midwives of Seventeenth-Century London, 125–26;
Wilson, “Ceremony of Childbirth and Its Interpretation,” 73.

So she sent Father Fryar to exhume the infant in the night and take the
body to be embalmed and placed in the royal sepulchres. The other boy
was christened Peregrine, meaning “foreign” (since he was a stranger to
Goodwin), and was delivered to a wet-nurse, who happened to be at the
midwife’s house at the time. Since Mary did not have enough money to
provide for a lying-in at the midwife’s house, she took a coach back to her
lodging and crawled up the two pair of stairs where she found Goodwin
anxiously awaiting her. For the next few days, she kept to her bed, and
Goodwin removed the soiled linens.
This was certainly not the usual childbirth experience. Normally,
an expectant mother would invite her female “gossips” to attend her
birth, along with the midwife. The woman’s bedroom would be con-
verted into a lying-in chamber, with heavy curtains on the windows to
keep out any poisonous miasma. After the birth, the new mother would
remain in this darkened space for up to a month, attended by a lying-in
maid. She would not even get out of bed for the first week.13 However,
Mary did not have a proper home in which to establish a lying-in cham-
ber. In cases like this, sometimes the local parish would pay for the ser-
vices of a midwife and provide room and board for the mother at an
approved parish home. These private homes for lying-in were typically
in the east end of London, particularly the riverside parishes of Stepney
and Whitechapel.14
But Mary was delivering bastard children, which raised additional
concerns. In such cases, midwives generally avoided performing deliveries
in their own homes, for fear of being accused of performing abortions.15
Guest houses and alehouses in the London suburbs would accommodate
a woman in trouble for a fee.16 Daniel Defoe describes an illicit birth in
The Fortunes and Misfortunes of Moll Flanders (1722). Moll was directed to
a midwife “at the sign of the Cradle,” who provided her own house for
women to deliver their children. In addition to her midwifery skills, the
woman furnished the necessary childbed linens and a maidservant for the
lying-in period. She also made arrangements for a minister to christen the
newborn.17 Mary, however, did not have the requisite four or five pounds
13. Wilson, “Ceremony of Childbirth and Its Interpretation,” 75–92.

14. Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death, 77; Evenden, Midwives of Seventeenth-Century London, 80–86.
15. Evenden, Midwives of Seventeenth-Century London, 86.
16. Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death, 77.
17. Defoe, Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, 176–94.

104 Chapter 7
that such an arrangement would have required. Moll’s midwife also kept
the parish authorities from pursuing her. Unwed mothers and their ille-
gitimate children were a particular concern to the parish where they were
born. The parish was responsible for all children born within its bound-
aries, even if the parents’ home was elsewhere. The mother and child
could become a burden on the parish poor rate. As a result, the mother
could be imprisoned in a house of correction. Keeping the birth secret
also protected the father of the child. If a bastard birth was reported to the
local justice of the peace, he could investigate and the father could be held
financially responsible.18
As for sending little Peregrine to a wet nurse, this was still a relatively
common practice. Nursing one’s own child was believed to be degrading
for elite women. The practice of putting a child out to nurse had long
been imitated by the middling sort.19 And Mary required much more than
a temporary wet nurse. Again, Defoe sheds light on the method of dealing
with unwanted or “inconvenient” children. Moll’s midwife arranged for
a poor cottager’s wife to raise Moll’s son for an initial fee of £10 and an
annual allowance of £5. Moll was allowed to see the child whenever she
wished, but she remained anonymous.20 Mary must have made a similar
arrangement for her surviving babies.
After the exertions of giving birth, common sense would dictate
physical and sexual restraint until the body had recovered. Seventeenth-
century midwifery manuals recommended abstinence from any sexual
activity until at least the end of the six-week lying-in period. But Good-
win reported that four days after delivering two babies, Mary conceived
another boy child. As if it weren’t astonishing enough that she was hav-
ing intercourse four days after childbirth, during postpartum bleeding, she
conceived again one week later. She was pregnant with a third child later
in the month. This is a pattern that would repeat itself many times during
the couple’s relationship.
A month after the third conception of a boy, Mary conceived
a daughter. Goodwin explained in his journal that this was because he
was lying on the opposite side of the bed than he usually occupied. The
sixteenth-century physician Thomas Reynalde acknowledged that classical
18. Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death, 74–75.

19. McLaren, “Nature’s Contraceptive,” 426–27.
20. Defoe, Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, 191–94.

authors believed that the womb had seven cells: boy children were con-
ceived if the seed fell in any of the three right cells. By 1560, Reynalde
had discarded this idea as a fallacy.21 A century later, when the midwife
Jane Sharp wrote her manual, she was giving the credit (or blame) for the
sex of the child to the man. According to her, the right “stone” was hotter
and therefore produced stronger seed, which resulted in male children.22
By 1724, the physician Thomas Maubray had combined the two concepts:
“if the Seed has flown into the Right Side of the Womb, from the Right
Rein of the Man, a Male will be conceiv’d; if into the Left, from the Left
Rein, a Female; by reason of the Frigidity and Humidity of that Place.
Which Notion may seem probable; considering, that tho’ the Womb has
but one Cavity, yet it has two Sinuses for conceiving the Two different
Sexes.”23 The anonymous author who penned Aristotle’s Master-piece (1694)
gave credit to “the force of Imagination” (Mary’s forte) in determining the
sex of the child. He also suggested that the woman should keep warm, lie
very still on the right side, and drink “a little Spirit of Saffron, and Iuice
of Hysop, in a Glass of Mallaga o Aligant” for a week. A little astrological
knowledge was also helpful, as the best time for conceiving male children
was “when the Sun is in Leo, and Moon’s Signs is Virtigo [sic], Scorpia,
or Sagitarius.”24 Similar advice was offered to beget a girl child. Mary’s
insight into these matters was firmly rooted in the medicine and natural
philosophy of the day.
Another anomaly that was not outside the parameters of contem-
porary medicine was a term of pregnancy longer than nine months. The
physician Crooke stated that “the birth at nine moneths is most legitmate
and to Nature most familiar. In the tenth month trauell is not so vncouth”
but “the eleauenth moneth is the last time and vtmost limit, which who-
soeuer exceedeth, is deceiued in the time of her conception, and the Cat
we say hath eaten her marke.”25 Mary stretched the limits of these parame-
ters. The babies that Mary conceived in May 1684 should have been born
around February 1685. But in December 1684, Mary conceived a fifth
child. The spirits told her that it would stay in her womb when she deliv-
ered the other four children. It was not until April 1685, almost a year after
21. Reynalde, Birth of Mankind, ed. Hobby, 35.

22. Sharp, Midwives Book, bk. 1, chap. 4, p. 19.
23. Maubray, Female Physician, chap. 6, p. 55.
24. Pseud. Aristotle, Aristotle’s Master-Piece, 8–10.
25. Crooke, Mikrokosmographia, 147–48.

106 Chapter 7
the first conception, that Mary felt “a certain sort of opening and working
in her womb as if it were by a hand that did it” while at a tavern.26
By this time, the couple openly shared accommodations in a lodging
on Long Acre (although they still maintained separate bedrooms). Once
again, Mary needed to go to a midwife to be delivered. At eight o’clock at
night, she made her way down to the waterfront to Mrs. Martin, a midwife
located at the lower end of the York Buildings, built in the late seventeenth
century on the site of York House. Two hours later, she returned in a
sedan chair to where St. Martin’s Lane meets Long Acre. Although she
was extremely weak from having delivered all five babies, she managed to
walk the remaining distance home. Unfortunately, the children lived just
long enough to be christened and were allegedly buried at St. Martin-in-
the-Fields. (No records are extant to support this claim.) Again, Goodwin
dutifully put Mary to bed and acted as her lying-in maid. Two days later,
she was recovered enough that she “shifted herself,” meaning she got out
of bed and changed her linens.27
True to form, Mary conceived again seven days after the delivery of
the five children, and again two days later, and again a week after that. For
the most part, Mary bore her pregnancies stoically, never complaining or
neglecting her duties to the spirit world. But this time, she was destined to
experience some losses, and the blame was clearly put on Goodwin. One
day when she was in a passion, he pulled her to make her stay and, as a
result, she miscarried one of the fetuses. On another occasion, Goodwin
was arrested for a small debt, which upset Mary to such an extent that she
lost her most recent conception. The multiple pregnancies and subsequent
miscarriages acted as a sort of control mechanism in their relationship.
On one occasion, Mary’s pregnancy afforded Goodwin the oppor-
tunity to come to her rescue while also demonstrating his faith in God. In
August of 1684, just a few months into her first pregnancy, Mary experi-
enced pain and vomiting while the couple was at a treasure site. She feared
that she might miscarry right there in the woods. To get back to the path,
they had to climb “a most terrible steep long craggy hill.”28 Goodwin and
another male companion barely managed to tug and pull Mary up inch by
inch to the top of the cliff, until all three were exhausted. Mary confided to

27. Ibid., 1:208.
28. Ibid., 1:144.

Goodwin that she could feel blood run from her “like a tap,”29 but Good-
win persisted in his prayers with such fervor that the bleeding stopped and
she didn’t miscarry on that occasion. In this case, Mary’s pregnancy acted
as a tool to bolster Goodwin’s faith in his own agency.
The cycle of conceptions and miscarriages continued throughout
the remainder of 1685, until Mary was only carrying two children by the
time Goodwin left to join his father on the Continent in April 1686. Mary
reported that the delivery, in Goodwin’s absence, had been very difficult,
just as it had been with the birth of her twenty-one children born in wed-
lock. The children had not survived, and Mary was confined to bed for
eight or ten days. When Goodwin returned from Europe in July 1686,
Mary was so exhausted from childbirth that she avoided his bed for fear
of more children. Mary may have used pregnancy as an excuse to termi-
nate the sexual aspect of their relationship. She offered the excuse that the
strain of conceiving children was killing her. She argued that this would
sidestep any jealousy with the princess of the Lowlanders, with whom he
was attempting to build a relationship at the time, so that he could come
into his kingdom. But Goodwin insisted that neither Mary nor he could
ignore their conjugal debt (they considered themselves married in the
eyes of God). So within a few days of Goodwin’s return, Mary conceived
another son, who was to be named Hezekiah. A month later, Mary con-
ceived a daughter, to be named Susanna. But 1686 was a difficult year for
Mary, and there were no multiple conceptions. This may mean that the
couple were not as sexually active or that Mary was not enjoying their
sexual encounters enough to yield conceptions.
It may have also been difficult for Mary to hide multiple pregnan-
cies. Throughout 1686, she had struggled with depression and a drinking
problem, and was frequently weak and sickly. She often came home wet
and weary from her endeavors with the spirit world, she was struggling
with a chronic bad cough, and she was so oppressed with grief and sorrow
that she sometimes prayed for death. On top of all this, the couple had no
money, and from lack of funds Mary had “fallen away to nothing.”30
Hezekiah and Susanna were delivered in a more timely fashion,
after only eight months. While Goodwin was at his father’s home in
Wooburn, Mary traveled by water to a midwife out of town, where she
29. Ibid., 1:145.

30. Ibid., 2:2.

108 Chapter 7
delivered within the hour without much pain. The babies were very small
but healthy and beautiful. They were put out to two separate wet nurses
and Mary returned to London five days later. Unfortunately, Susanna died
a month later by being “overlayd” by the nurse, a common danger when
infants slept in the same bed as adults. Hezekiah continued to thrive and
eventually Goodwin legitimized him as his heir.
The spring and summer of 1687 was a very fertile time for the cou-
ple. Between March and June, Mary conceived a dozen fetuses, not count-
ing some miscarriages, but she lost them all at the end of June. In July,
there was another round of conceptions, sometimes twice a day, resulting
in nine fetuses. They were all miscarried while Goodwin was away in Bath
attempting to reestablish his standing in the royal court of the Uplanders.
In the first few months following Goodwin’s return from Bath in
October 1687, “conceiving” became almost a daily occurrence, perhaps
reflecting how much the couple had missed one another during Goodwin’s
long absence. However, Mary was not always enthusiastic about their cou-
pling. On at least one occasion, she resisted Goodwin’s advances; he per-
sisted “almost entirely against her will.” When she thought that Goodwin
was asleep, she crawled out of his bed and returned to her own. The next
morning, Goodwin was worried that she would think ill of his behavior
(and so he should), but Mary was the one to apologize for her noncoop-
eration. The angels had told her that she “must not fall out with her hus-
band.”31 Either Mary took her conjugal debt very seriously, or she thought
that the sexual component of their relationship was vital to Goodwin’s
loyalty to her. And so the conceptions continued apace.
By January 1688, Mary was almost as big with child as she was when
she delivered Hezekiah and Susanna. By March, she was carrying forty
fetuses! A multiple pregnancy on even a grander scale had become leg-
endary since the thirteen century. Margaret, the Countess of Henneberg,
allegedly gave birth to 365 infants in one delivery. The babies were the size
of mice but perfect in their parts. The legend had spread all over Europe
during the Middle Ages and was published in the seventeenth century
in several volumes.32 Both Mary and Goodwin were probably aware of
this story. Mary’s lesser imitation of the legend would have placed her in
31. Ibid., 2:60.

32. Le Petit, Generall historie of the Netherlands, 52; Fullwood, Church-history of Britain, 28; Wanley, Wonders
of the little world, 40–41.

the category of the miraculous. But the summer was an anxious time for
Mary, as she struggled with jealousy over Goodwin’s affairs (with Uplander
women this time) and attempted to direct Goodwin’s attention to a rich
widow. She often miscarried several fetuses at a time, out of grief over
their many troubles. Finally in September, while Goodwin was at sea work-
ing on a deep-sea diving project, Mary delivered two daughters: a second
Susanna and Sarah. But Susanna was very small and weak and died a
couple of months later.
September 1688 was the beginning of a new round of conceptions
that resulted in seven fetuses. But after almost two years of pregnancy,
the children, who had apparently been long dead, started to abort in
a peacemeal fashion in July 1690. At this point, the twenty-first-century
reader will find Mary’s story unbelievable and, perhaps, look for a psycho-
logical explanation. But it is not useful to label Mary as either delusional or
a liar. People, both in the seventeenth century and now, employ additional
elements that help them make sense of their world. Mary may have drawn
on medical knowledge of the day, unconscious fantasies, or her own imag-
ination to explain actual physical phenomena. In Mary’s case, she was
engaged in producing meaning not only for herself but also for Goodwin.
One wonders if Mary was suffering from some form of fibroid tumors,
endometriosis, or other uterine disorder, which could have caused large
clots of blood and tissue to be expelled.33 She could have easily interpreted
these medical conditions as spontaneous abortions.
To put Mary’s reports of multiple conceptions and spontaneous
abortions in perspective, consider the story of Mary Toft.34 Although Toft’s
tale developed more than two decades after Mary Parish died, it illustrates
the mind-set of the medical profession, as well as the general population.
Mary Toft was a peasant woman from Surrey who had a strange birth
experience. She became pregnant in 1726, and alleged that while working
in the field during her pregnancy, she saw a rabbit. She attempted to catch
it but couldn’t. After that, she longed for rabbit to the point of obsession.
33. Mary’s description suggests gestational trophoblastic disease, including a hydatidiform mole, which
is an abnormal growth of tissue in the uterus as a result of fertilization of an enucleated ovum. The
unviable tissue is usually aborted naturally; Hui, Gestational Trophoblastic Disease, 1–14.
34. The following narrative is drawn from Ahlers, Some observations concerning the woman of Godlyman in
Surrey; St. André, Short narrative of an extraordinary delivery of rabbets; Bondeson, Cabinet of Medical Curiosities,
122–41; Cody, Birthing the Nation, 121–30; Philip K. Wilson, “Toft [née Denyer], Mary (bap. 1703, d.
1763), the rabbit-breeder,” DNB.

110 Chapter 7
Four months later, she started to abort pieces of flesh that looked suspi-
ciously like animal parts. A male midwife was called in, and he delivered
Toft of more than a dozen dead rabbits, or rabbit parts, over the course
of the next days and weeks. Apparently, the power of the maternal imag-
ination had caused the transformation of her child in the womb into a
warren of rabbits. Her case garnered countrywide attention, including the
curiosity of the king. Investigation eventually revealed that rabbit parts
were being smuggled into Toft’s bedchamber and unceremoniously stuffed
into her reproductive organs. Her motivation was supposedly fame and
fortune, neither of which came to fruition. After confessing her deceit, Toft
was committed to the Tothill-Fields Bridewell, a house of correction, as a
fraud. A spate of pamphlets satirized the whole affair. This incident reflects
the belief in the power of the imagination and the unorthodox medical
beliefs of the time, as well as the willingness of the general population to
entertain the bizarre. Considering the incident of Mary Toft, Goodwin
was not particularly gullible in his acceptance of Mary’s pregnancies.
Mary’s construction of serial conceptions may pertain to maternal
longings for her lost children. Or phantom pregnancies might have justi-
fied the moral concerns of illicit sexual activity.35 In any case, for the next
decade, Mary continued to conceive one child at a time, although at a
much slower rate and with longer than normal gestation periods. Some
fetuses were miscarried while others were born alive but died shortly there-
after. Goodwin’s journal gets very sporadic by the end of the 1690s and
all we know is that Mary was supposedly pregnant with a boy child on her
deathbed in 1703, at the age of seventy-two. At the very least, this tells us
that Mary and Goodwin, who was fifty years old at the time of her death,
were sexually active until the end of Mary’s life.
***
Mary was not Goodwin’s only sexual conquest during their twenty-year
relationship. As a woman who lived for a time at the Restoration court of
Charles II, Mary would have been familiar with the immoral behavior of
the aristocrats of the day. Seventeenth-century “court wits” such as the
Earl of Rochester and the Duke of Buckingham performed a version of
35. Jones, Fairy Tale, 74.

masculinity that was punctuated with raunchy exploits. This elite liberti-
nism was satirized by writers such as Ned Ward in The Rambling Rakes, who
quipped, “Night, Wine, and Love, no Moderation bear; / Night knows
no Shame, or Love and Wine no Fear.”36 Promiscuous behavior in the
Wharton family should not have come as a surprise to Mary. Goodwin’s
brothers, Tom and Henry, were well known for their sexual dalliances and
outrageous behavior.37
Goodwin readily admitted that monogamy was difficult for him. He
constantly had to “resist those passions which nature would often suggest,
& Satan encourage the more to vex [him].”38 Even though he was living
and sleeping with Mary on a daily basis, he was tempted by every pretty
young woman who crossed his path. He claimed that if he didn’t have
intercourse with a woman for three or four days, he produced “an unimag-
inable quantity of seed,” which he believed was responsible for his high
fertility with Mary. At one point, the Lord bluntly told him to “Fuck (every
week) where you us’d to doe” (meaning with Mary) and “Throw water on
your self ” to manage his lust.39
However, this had not stopped Goodwin from initiating an affair
with one Mrs. Wilder. Mary had befriended this niece of an Irish gentle-
woman in March 1685. Mrs. Wilder had been seduced by a man of qual-
ity in Ireland, who had promised to marry her. Based on this traditional
method of betrothal, Mrs. Wilder had been persuaded to lie with the rogue
and subsequently found herself pregnant, abandoned, and banished from
her family’s home. Not an uncommon story for the time. Goodwin grew
fond of the woman, and one day when Mary and the maid were out, he
found Mrs. Wilder amenable to his desires. But a couple of days later, he
suspected that he might have contracted some form of venereal disease
from her. After dining with her at a local public house, Goodwin con-
fronted her with this delicate problem. When Mrs. Wilder protested her
innocence, Goodwin lay with her again. He intended to explain that he
only desired to have a child by her, but was “prevented from any long dis-
course by Mrs. Parish’s coming up the stairs.”40
36. Ward, Rambling Rakes, 9. For a more general discussion of libertinism, see Hopkins, Constant Delights.
37. For Tom and Henry Wharton’s behavior, see Turner, Libertines and Radicals in Early Modern London,
x–xi, 165–66, 231.
39. Ibid., 1:306.
40. Ibid., 1:197.

112 Chapter 7
Goodwin’s initial suspicions were confirmed a day or two later

when he was struck with full symptoms of “the pox,” or what the English
called the “French disease.” Seventeenth-century people did not differ-
entiate between the various types of sexually transmitted diseases. A
diagnosis of the pox applied to a wide range of symptoms, including a
burning sensation during urination, genital discharge, and genital ulcers,
which could have been signs of syphilis, gonorrhea, or some other form
of venereal disorder. Later stages of the pox manifested as oozing sores
and bodily pains.41 Women were usually blamed as the carriers of the
disease. Goodwin paid a visit to Mrs. Wilder’s lodgings, intending to
break off the affair. The double standard of the day concerning sexual
morality caused him to denounce her for her base behavior. His part in
the affair, on the other hand, was not the problem. He was surprised to
find Mary sitting at the woman’s bedside, aware of the situation. Mary
flew into one of her violent passions, threatening to never see or speak to
Goodwin again on account of his sexual indiscretions. The next day, she
returned home “oppressed with grief and disquietness” and threw her-
self on the bed in despair. Goodwin surreptitiously applied the frog bone
charm to win back her affections. The love charm, combined with kind
words and a lot of groveling, fostered the beginnings of her forgiveness.
She refused to play cards with him that evening, which they often did as
a diversion to their melancholic state. The venereal disease was less for-
giving. Goodwin was “almost raked away to nothing” by his distemper,
despite several purges and Mary’s best physic. There is no mention of
mercury treatments, which were often used in later stages of the disease
to rid the patient of the poison. To add injury to insult, Mary also suf-
fered “a little pain and sharpness of urine.”42 In all fairness, Goodwin
had reason to believe that Mary would not object to any extracurricu-
lar activities. She had been quite tolerant when it came to Goodwin’s
affairs with the Lowlander women. Although she had expressed jealousy
of Queen Penelope, she had been willing to bury her own feelings for his
benefit. And on more than one occasion, Mary had protested that she
was too old for him anyway.
Mary and the angels had even encouraged Goodwin to seek out
a rich wife so that he could have a fortune settled on him. However,
41. Siena, Venereal Disease, Hospitals and the Urban Poor, 15–22.
42. Autobiography of Goodwin Wharton, 1:198, 199, 201.

in contrast to the affair with Mrs. Wilder, this potential relationship was
under Mary’s careful management, as were the Lowlander relationships.
After Goodwin returned from his trip to the Continent with his father in
July 1686, Mary’s familiar spirit, George, was contacted by the spirit of
a man who was the cousin of a Spanish Uplander princess by the name
of Anne Gartwrott. The young woman, not yet of legal age, had seen
Goodwin in Europe and had instantly become enamored with him. This
was after the Lowlander queen had died and the situation with her sister
Princess Ursula had deteriorated. For Mary to construct this scenario, she
must have been fairly certain that Goodwin would have flirted with women
while he was away. Sure enough, when Goodwin heard this news, he
reported that he had exchanged glances with a strange, beautiful maiden
at Aix-la-Chapelle, although he had not learned her name. Goodwin had
accompanied his father to Aix-la-Chapelle, or Aachen, which was a pop-
ular spa town with hot sulphur springs, located in the western principality
of the Holy Roman Empire. Mary transformed this unknown woman into
Princess Gartwrott. But this romance was doomed to failure on account of
close supervision by her relatives and a bout of smallpox that led to blind-
ness. Eventually, the princess returned to France in the fall of 1687 where
she grew very ill and died. This diversion was probably designed to occupy
Goodwin’s time and give him hope of an advantageous match. Ironically,
this was the very purpose for which Goodwin used it with his father.
Mary’s creation of Princess Gartwrott may have been influenced by
the story of a notorious Englishwoman, Mary Carleton, who fashioned
herself as a German princess, Maria de Wolway.43 However, unlike Car-
leton, Mary Parish created a completely independent character from her-
self, in the same way that the queen of the Lowlanders was a separate entity.
There were many pamphlets about Carleton after her trial for bigamy at
the Old Bailey in 1663. She even starred briefly as herself in a play written
about her misadventures. Another spate of pamphlets was issued after her
public hanging in 1673. She had returned illegally from Jamaica where
she had been transported for theft in 1671. Born as Mary Moders near
Canterbury (1642?), Carleton self-constructed herself as a gentlewoman.
She played multiple roles during her brief life, apparently having a talent
43. The following narrative is constructed from Carleton, Arraignment, tryal and examination of Mary
Moders; Lilley, “Mary Carleton’s False Additions”; Suzuki, “Case of Mary Carleton”; Janet Todd,
“Carleton [née Moders], Mary [nicknamed the German Princess] (1634x42–1673), impostor,” DNB.

114 Chapter 7
for passing as a wronged gentlewoman. The German princess role resulted

in her marrying an eighteen-year-old law clerk who posed as a rich gentle-
man. Both parties were trying to get the other’s alleged wealth. However,
in the subsequent bigamy trial, Carleton managed to convince the court
that she was “a stranger, and a forreigner,” rather than the woman they
were indicting.44 Without sufficient evidence of a previous marriage, she
was acquitted.
Although Mary Parish did not present herself as a foreign aristocrat,
there are similarities between her and Mary Carleton. Both women pre-
sented themselves as victims who were alienated from their rightful posi-
tions and possessions. Both displayed transgressive behavior in order to
cross social and gender lines. At the treasure-hunting expedition involving
Prince Rupert, Mary Parish had “disguise[d] herself in man’s clothes.”45
Kate Lilley describes Carleton’s actions as “masculinised agency,” which
could be equally applied to Mary’s ability to take control of a situation. In
both cases, the women’s “actress-like conduct” demonstrated how perfor-
mative and tenuous social status was.46 Curiously, both women were also
Catholic.
Mary also encouraged Goodwin to pursue a relationship with a real
flesh and blood woman. A financially and socially substantial wife would
have increased Goodwin’s social status and helped his political career. The
woman in question was Theodosia Ivy, the wealthy widow of a London
merchant, Thomas Ivy. Lady Ivy was a very handsome sixty-year-old
widow, who apparently looked twenty years younger than her age. She
had amassed a vast fortune in copper mines and had invested in patents for
the making of white paper. She was also “very knowing in most secrets of
learning” and was famous for curing sore eyes.47 The angels assured Mary
that Goodwin should marry her and conceive a child, by which he would
gain access to her estate, and then Lady Ivy would die shortly thereafter.
Mary met face to face with Lady Ivy to help broker the marriage con-
tract. In private meetings, Lady Ivy assured her that she had great plans
to provide for Goodwin. Goodwin entered into an informal and clandes-
tine marriage with Lady Ivy by their fourth meeting in November 1687.
44. Carleton, Arraignment, tryal and examination of Mary Moders, 14.

46. Lilley, “Mary Carleton’s False Additions,” 83.

The couple joined hands and pledged everlasting devotion to each other.
However, Goodwin had considerable difficulty consummating the union,
being deterred by Lady Ivy’s “monthly distemper,” her pressing legal
concerns, and her ill health. Nevertheless, the Lord encouraged Good-
win to visit the widow and ingratiate himself with her, which he did
for the rest of 1688. In February 1689, Goodwin attempted twice to
have intercourse with Lady Ivy but found her unwilling and, worse yet,
he found himself impotent toward her. When he finally announced that
he was no longer going to pursue a sexual relationship with Ivy, Mary
admitted that, even though she had desired it for Goodwin’s sake, she
had found the thought unbearable. In spite of the failed romance, Lady
Ivy eventually became a valuable financial partner in the couple’s diving
projects. She also acted as an intermediary between Goodwin and James
II. She introduced Goodwin to the Quaker William Penn, who was in the
king’s good graces.
Goodwin also pursued some romantic interests on his own. In the
fall of 1687, he went to Bath in an attempt to secure a position at court.
The Romans had built a spa and temple at the natural hot springs in Bath
in the first century. After falling into disrepair during the Middle Ages, the
site was rebuilt and revived in the Elizabethan period. By James II’s reign,
Bath was attracting the aristocracy and was a popular retreat for members
of the court. For Goodwin, the attraction was Queen Mary Beatrice, con-
sort to James II. Not only did she hope that the spa’s healing properties
would help her to get pregnant, but she was doing her part in a publicity
campaign to charm the English people into supporting James’s unpopular
reign. While the queen and her ladies enjoyed the hot springs, spectators
looked down on them from a gallery. Goodwin had his eye on the queen as
a potential romance, which would culminate in their illegitimate son being
the next heir to the throne.
Goodwin did not have any success with the queen, but he did become
intimate with his landlady while he was in Bath. According to Goodwin,
she was “a very good natured pretty woman,” who was married.48 Good-
win wrote that the pair had intercourse while standing in an entry, and
she had supposedly conceived two children by him. After his return from
Bath, in February of 1688, Mary noticed a spot on her shoulder, which she
48. Ibid., 2:35.

116 Chapter 7
suspected was a sign of the pox. She also noted that Goodwin had been
“hotter” than usual, whatever that might mean. In her intuitive way, she
nosed around until she discovered the affair with the landlady. Mary main-
tained that Goodwin had not been granted permission from the spirits in
this matter, or she would have gladly agreed to the match. In addition to
reprimands from Mary, Goodwin was rebuked directly by the spirit world.
A few days later, Mary told him that she had resolved to marry some other
(unnamed) “sober rich man” who was courting her, and leave him to his
other women.49 She would not tolerate Goodwin pursuing every skirt he
passed. But Goodwin did not want to accept the end of their relationship,
which would have also ended his intercourse with the spirit realm. After
several hours of wrangling, they came to the agreement that Mary would
come to Goodwin’s bed whenever it pleased her without any pressure
from him, and she was even free to marry (if God allowed it). In return,
she agreed not to be jealous of Goodwin’s affairs or trouble herself about
them.
Nevertheless, at the end of May 1688, Mary became suspicious
about a stain on Goodwin’s shirt. Goodwin had met another young gentle-
woman at a ball in Bath. Cecilia Gay, the stepdaughter of the alderman of
Bath, Edward Bushell, was not yet twenty years old.50 Goodwin described
her as “very pretty & a good fortune.” However, he had not had the oppor-
tunity to close the deal while in Bath. In the winter of 1687/88, Mrs.
Gay (as Goodwin called her) arrived in London. Goodwin accompanied
her publicly to the theatre, which he never would have done with Mary.
Little quarrels and delays kept him from touching her until late in May.
At the time, “her flowers were upon her,” which led Goodwin to believe
that she was a virgin. After Mary found out about this latest dalliance, the
archangel Michael informed Goodwin that Mrs. Gay had slept with more
than twenty men, which, of course, was scandalous. The Lord made it
clear that he should have “no Harlots but only a wife.”51 A few days later,
the Lord reaffirmed that he never gave a harlot to Goodwin and that he
must desist from his concerns with women below his station. This became
a recurring theme in the Lord’s proclamations (discussed in more detail in
chapter 9). Goodwin was reminded more than once about the “trouble &
49. Ibid., 2:74.

51. Autobiography of Goodwin Wharton, 2:41, 89, 87.

misery” his adultery had caused to one who was “true & faithful” to him.
The Lord constantly reminded Goodwin of Mary’s worth:
Goodwin Wharton, thy woman I did give to thee

hath proved young & faithful & honest unto thee
and many a fine children thou hast had by she
but in small time she will not care much for thee
then thou shalt see what will become of thee.52
The audible voice of the Lord told him that he should not part with Mary
as she was his true wife.
52. Ibid., 2:76, 88.

Chapter 8
The Traumas of
Treasure Hunting
Around the time that Mary first got pregnant, she and Goodwin started
looking for buried treasure. Treasure hunting was a popular activity in
the seventeenth century and not without good reason. The institution of
banking was still in its developmental stages and the concept of deposit-
ing wealth for safekeeping was not yet in practice. People regularly bur-
ied riches in the form of coins, jewels, and silver plate. Treasure seekers
were also occasionally rewarded with ancient caches of Roman or medi-
eval coins and other artifacts.1 Barrows and wayside crosses were partic-
ularly popular locations. The connection between treasure hunting and
the occult had been acknowledged in the first statute against conjurations,
witchcraft, and sorcery, which was enacted during the reign of Henry VIII.
The statute specifically forbade anyone to “dig up or pull down any Crosse
or Crosses” for money or treasure.2
The marginalized members of society were not the only people who
looked for treasure. The well-respected Elizabethan astrologer and math-
ematician John Dee consulted with the angel Uriel to determine the loca-
tion of treasure left behind by the Danes before they were driven out of
England in the Middle Ages.3 And even elites were frequent participants.
In 1546, Henry Neville, fifth Earl of Westmorland, engaged in occult
1. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 235.

2. 33 Hen. VIII, c.8. (1542), in Statutes of the Realm, vol. 3, [1509–1545], 837.
3. Fenton, Diaries of John Dee, 66–73.
118

The Traumas of Treasure Hunting 119
activities to pay off heavy gambling debts.4 According to the physician

and cunning man Simon Forman, Neville had £5,000 hidden in a cellar
at Eridge in Sussex before he died.5 Sometimes these expeditions were a
form of entertainment. The magician and astrologer William Lilly joined
David Ramsey, Charles I’s groom of the bedchamber, to search for bur-
ied treasure at Westminster Abbey in 1632. They were accompanied by
an entourage of more than thirty men and an unnamed magician from
Pudding Lane.6 Theoretically, anyone with a spade could dig for trea-
sure, but it was common to enlist the help of a cunning person to locate
the stash.7 For example, Simon Forman often used astrological figures on
behalf of his clients to “know what [treasure] is hid there, how deep it is,
whether it may be found or no, of what value, whether newly hid, whole
or diminished.”8 The other role of the cunning person was to subdue any
guardian spirits. At Westminster Abbey, William Lilly was called upon to
exercise his occult knowledge to banish spirits that arose in the form of a
fierce, blustering wind.
As a cunning woman, Mary had previous experience in looking for
treasure. Shortly after the death of her second husband, Mr. Lawrence,
she had been asked to assist in a treasure-hunting expedition at a house
in Islington, a suburb north of London. A doctor of divinity by the name
of Wallbank had discovered treasure at a certain great house that stood
empty. But whenever he got close to what he thought was the treasure,
it seemingly sank lower, a commonly reported phenomenon in treasure
stories. When the searchers got too close, the guardian spirits removed
it from their grasp. So Wallbank approached Mary, who had a reputa-
tion for dealing with spirits, and made great promises to her of a share
in the treasure if she would assist. She was initially wary, as she had been
abused in these types of ventures before, but at length she agreed to help.
Much to Mary’s surprise, after they had been digging for some time, the
spirit of the former archbishop of Canterbury William Laud appeared in
front of her. The archbishop is perhaps best remembered for his attempt
to enforce the Anglican Book of Prayer on the Church of Scotland, and
the subsequent civil wars that led to the regicide of Charles I. Laud told
4. Keith Dockray, “Henry Neville, fifth earl of Westmorland (1524/5–1564),” DNB.

5. Rowse, Case Books of Simon Forman, 218.
6. Lilly, Last of the Astrologers, 32.
7. Davies, Cunning-Folk, 93–96.
8. Simon Forman, as reproduced in Rowse, Case Books of Simon Forman, 100.

120 Chapter 8
Mary that the treasure they were seeking had been placed there by Queen
Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles I, along with several noblemen, for the
promotion of the Roman Catholic cause. He confessed to Mary that the
reason his spirit was restless was that he had pretended to the world to
be a devout member of the Church of England, but in his heart he had
died a Roman Catholic. Indeed, accusations of popery had followed Laud
from his student days at Oxford until his death.9 Mary claimed that Laud
was her godfather. The archbishop requested that she arrange five or six
masses for him at the Catholic chapel that Catherine of Braganza, Charles
II’s queen, maintained at Somerset House.10 After the requiem masses
were said, Mary never saw Laud’s spirit again. Goodwin must have been
impressed with Mary’s elite connections, even if he didn’t agree with the
archbishop’s religious views.
There were other spirits that opposed the treasure hunters at every
turn. The dirt that the treasure seekers removed during the day was all
thrown back into the hole during the night. After several days of this
frustration, they began to work only at night and set watchers during the
day. This proved somewhat more successful, until they actually discovered
some coins. When they reached down to pick them up, there was such a
hideous cacophony that no one but Mary would dare to attempt to reach
them. But even when she could get the money in her hands, it mysteriously
slipped out again. Sometimes the coins were made so hot by the spirits that
she had to use tongs to retrieve them, but the very tips of the tongs melted.
At other times, she was pulled about by invisible hands, until she had no
choice but to leave off her efforts. Constantly, the spirits chided and railed
against her, which just made her more determined to proceed.
By this time, the expedition had attracted several unnamed men of
high status who were curious to see the spirits. Several of these men agreed
to meet Prince Rupert, King Charles II’s nephew, at the Islington house.
The prince was the son of Charles’s sister Elizabeth, who had been mar-
ried off to the German prince Frederick V, Elector Palatine. Rupert had a
reputation of involvement with the occult. During the civil wars, he was
commander of the Royalist cavalry. A member of the parliamentarian fac-
tion published a satirical pamphlet about his white poodle, Boy, which was
suspected of being a witch’s familiar. The dog allegedly helped his master
9. Anthony Milton, “William Laud (1573–1645),” DNB.

10. Caroline M. Hibbard, “Henrietta Maria (1609–1669),” DNB.

find “Concealed goods” at Oxford University for the Royalist cause.11 The
last to arrive at the Islington house was one Mr. Garroll, a gentleman in
service to the prince, who reported that Rupert had been detained due
to some urgent matter. The group resolved to set about the business by
midnight. But Garroll was not a patient man. When it was almost twelve
o’clock, he stood up in a huffy, boasting manner, and exclaimed, “God
damn this devil! He doth not come. I will go see if I can see him.”12 He
went outside and looked through the window into the room where the trea-
sure lay. The spirit of an old man with a pair of spectacles rose up. Garroll
was so terrified that he ran back into the other room and fainted. After
being carried to the prince’s house in Spring Gardens, at the entrance to
Whitehall, he recovered enough to tell his tale. But the fright was so great
that he died within three days. This incident put an end to the whole affair.
The price Mary would pay for challenging the spirits would come later
in the form of Prince Rupert’s revenge for the loss of his beloved servant,
which is what the Lowlanders had come to warn her about on their first
visit to her room.
Mary learned two lessons from her experience at Islington. First
of all, discretion was of the utmost importance in these matters. Sec-
ond, the cooperation of the guardian spirits was advisable. So in June of
1683, when the couple discovered treasure at Hounslow Heath, they sent
George to investigate. Mary and Goodwin were staying at their favor-
ite inn at Hounslow while they patiently waited for the king and queen
to return from Rye. They spent their leisure time roaming the heath to
the west of the village, where the local peasants pastured their livestock
and hunted small game. The English countryside was dotted with many
barrows or ancient burial sites. One day, the couple noticed a mound of
earth surrounded by four great elm trees in the center of the commons.
The arrangement of the trees and the precise configuration of the mound
suggested that it had once had a particular purpose. George reported that
a vast treasure had been concealed there during the reign of King John,
whose hunting lodge Mary had visited years before with the woman from
Longford. The treasure was guarded by the spirits, or ghosts, of the thir-
teen men and women who had hidden it. Five of the spirits, including a
11. T. B., Observations vpon Prince Rupert’s vvhite dog, called Boy, A1v; Anon., Parliaments vnspotted-bitch in
answer to Prince Roberts dog called Boy and his malignant she-monkey.

122 Chapter 8
martyred nun, were good, but the other eight were evil. The good spirits
had no problem parting with the goods, as they were bound to the place
until it was delivered to someone.
However, the couple could not very well dig for treasure in the mid-
dle of a common that was for the use of everyone in the parish, even if they
had the blessing of all the spirits. Fortunately, Mary remembered instruc-
tions from her grimoire concerning a way to banish evil spirits and open
the ground without digging. They just needed “a caracteristicall parch-
ment” and two properly prepared wands, which would temporarily open
the ground.13 Hazel wands, or “Mosaical rods” as they were sometimes
called, would bend toward the earth at the site of gold or silver, similar to
the technique of “witching” for water still practiced by some people today.
Magic wands were frequently discussed in magic manuals. In 1584 Regi-
nald Scot described many magical techniques in his book, The Discoverie of
Witchcraft, with the intention of debunking such “superstitions.” Ironically,
the book went a long way in making occult information readily available
to the general public. By 1683, Discoverie had been circulating for a century
and had become a virtual grimoire for would-be magicians. Scot describes
a typical operation, which he considered superstitious in a section entitled
“The Art and Order to be used in digging for money.”
There must be made upon a hazell wand three crosses, and

certeine words both blasphemous and impious must be said
over it, and hereunto must be added certeine characters &
barbarous names. And whilest the treasure is a digging, there
must be read the psalmes, De profundis, Missa, Misereatur nostri,
Requiem, Pater noster, Ave Maria, Et ne nos inducas in tentationem, sed
libera nos à malo, Amen. A porta inferni credo videre bona, &c. Expectate
Dominum, Requiem aeternam. And then a certeine praier. And if
the time of digging be neglected, the divell will carrie all the
treasure awai.14
The popularity of the text is evident in a case involving an alleged fortune-

teller, Ann Watts. At the time of her arrest, Watts was in possession of
Scot’s Discoverie, along with several other occult books.15 Another cunning
13. Ibid., 1:7.

14. Scot, Discouerie of Witchcraft, ed. Summers, bk. 10, chap. 7, p. 102.
15. Watts was arraigned at a petty session in Stratford, Essex, in June 1687. An indication of Ann Watts’s
social standing can be gleaned from one of her companions at the time of her arrest. Ann was in the

woman, Anne Kingsbury of Somerset, claimed that she had learned the
art of using divining rods from the well-known astrologer William Lilly.
Kingsbury used “inchaunted rods,” half an ell long (approximately twenty-
two inches), to locate hidden treasure.16 Other grimoires recommended that
the wands be cut with a single stroke at sunrise on the day of Mercury (that
is, a Wednesday) from a tree no older than one year. Then they were to
be inscribed with appropriate characters on the day and hour of Mercury.
After being consecrated and perfumed with sweet incense, such as aloe,
nutmeg, gum benjamin, or musk, they were to be put aside in a clean place
until needed.17
According to Mary, two different sticks, from different trees, were
required. One, the common smooth hazel, which produces hazelnuts,
was readily available. But the other, a “she” witch hazel (which is actu-
ally a type of elm), was more difficult to find.18 So Mary and Good-
win returned to London to inquire of the herb women and gardeners
about where they might locate the witch hazel. Some women thought
they might find it in Highgate Woods, an ancient woodland north of
the city beyond Hampstead Heath, but they returned with the wrong
thing. Another man suggested looking in the garden at Charter House in
Smithfields. Goodwin went to the site of the ancient Carthusian monas-
tery, but the yard and gardens had been newly remodeled, and the tree
was no longer there. Another lead sent them searching along the verge
of Tyburn Road, but even with George’s help, they could not find it.
Further inquiries led them to the area around the aqueduct of the New
River, which brought fresh water from the River Lee, twenty miles away
in Hertfordshire. The meadow around the canal was wet and the hedges
along the banks were thick. Their search led them a mile out of the city,
and after climbing a steep hill, Mary was so weary and out of breath that
she could walk no further.
company of Susanna Kingsman and two other women. Susanna was the wife of Richard Kingsman, a
distiller, who had finished his apprenticeship and been admitted as a member of the distiller’s company;
London Livery Company Apprenticeship Registers, vol. 11, Distiller’s Company 1659–1811; Guild Hall, London,
Freedom Admission Register 1638–1708, Guildhall MS 6215, fol. 51.
16. Somerset Record Office, Q/SR 146/25 (June 15, 1680); Trotman, “Seventeenth Century
Treasure-Seeking.”
17. Greater Key of Solomon, ed. De Laurence, bk. 2, chap. 8, p. 101, and bk. 2, chap. 10, p. 105.
18. The shrub known as witch hazel, or Hamamelis Virginiana, is native to North America but was un-
known in Europe. The old name of “wych” hazel referred to the wych elm, or Ulmus Glabra, because
of the similar leaves. It is a completely different species to hazel; OED, s.v. “witch hazel, wych hazel.”

124 Chapter 8
Mary’s general health had suffered from her broken leg and poor
living conditions before she met Goodwin. But since meeting him, she had
gradually recovered and gained a considerable amount of weight. Good-
win had assisted in her recovery by preparing medicines to cleanse her sys-
tem and balance her humors. In May of 1683, Goodwin had prepared a
double batch of a purgative: one half was intended for Mary and the other
for someone else. When Mary arrived at Goodwin’s room at the Temple,
she saw the concoction on the window sill and, in her impetuous manner,
drank the whole thing before Goodwin could stop her. The immediate
solution to the incident was to drink a glass of sack, a white wine from
Spain, to cause her to vomit it up. But the combination of the wine and
the medicine made Mary retch so vigorously and for such a long time that
it caused a tear in a small blood vessel in her throat. In between bouts of
retching, she directed Goodwin to fetch comfrey and nettle seed, to staunch
the bleeding and knit the vein.19 Even the Lowlanders got involved: Father
Fryar and the queen advised taking three or four grains or crystals of sper-
maceti, the wax that was harvested from the head of the sperm whale.
They cautioned that if the vein did not knit by midnight, Mary was at risk
of bleeding to death.
This incident provided Mary an opportunity to demonstrate her
growing devotion to Goodwin. She summoned George and made him
swear that he would come to Goodwin as soon as she was dead. Her great-
est gift was her promise that as soon as she passed into the spirit realm, she
would come to Goodwin herself, as his own familiar spirit. In time, the
vomiting ceased. But Mary continued to cough from the blood constantly
trickling down her throat. Goodwin laid his hands over the throbbing
vein to support her neck when she coughed, and, for years to come, Mary
attributed her survival to this laying-on of hands, which has a long history
in Judeo-Christian traditions of curing illness. Although the crisis passed,
Mary was subject to fits of vomiting for the next few months.
So after the exertion of climbing the hill, Mary feared that the strain
from huffing and puffing would rupture the vein in her neck again. There
was no hope of getting a coach, as they were not on the main road. But as
luck would have it, a man came along who had been carrying corn to the
mill and was headed back to London without a load. The horse was only

saddled with a pannel, a sort of frameless pad to which the corn had been
fastened, but Mary was determined to ride the beast anyway, as Goodwin
walked alongside. When they were almost back to London, they encoun-
tered a wagon full of hay being pulled by a donkey, on the road ahead of
them. Mary, with her usual impatience, desired to pass by. She directed
her mount to the narrow space on the left hand side, between the ditch
and the cart. The man leading the donkey tried to accommodate her by
veering to the right. But from Mary’s perspective, it appeared as if the load
of hay was swerving towards her. Afraid that she might be hit by the falling
hay, she leaned backward on the horse. Her movement was so quick that
she lost her balance. As she toppled from the horse, Goodwin caught her
about the knees, and she landed in an unceremonious lump on top of him.
So the second repercussion of her ill health was Goodwin’s aching back,
which was initially attributed to this heroic gesture and subsequently led
to the discovery of the queen’s secret nighttime trysts. These are a couple
of examples of how Mary used her physical body as a connecting point to
the spiritual realm.
Although that particular outing was unsuccessful, the couple even-
tually found the right “she” witch hazel, and George delivered the sticks
to Father Fryar to be consecrated. The spirits who guarded the treasure at
the four trees in Hounslow Heath had told Mary and Goodwin that the
cache could only be delivered at the new moon, at which time the ground
would open for only one hour. Their first opportunity was Sunday, August
12, 1683. Father Fryar met them on the commons (invisible, of course,
since none of the Lowlanders was allowed to appear to Goodwin until
after he met with the queen). He struck the mound between the trees with
the newly consecrated wands. The earth opened and he entered. In a short
while, he returned in a huff and struck the rods on the earth again. The
ground immediately closed. He explained to the befuddled couple that the
spirits had refused to give him anything. They said that they had promised
the treasure to Mary and Goodwin and would not release it into another’s
hands. So the couple had no choice but to wait for the next new moon in
September to try again.
But on September 10 their landlady at the inn at Hounslow, a med-
dlesome and nosy woman, asked them if they wanted to walk out with
her and her children to the commons to milk her cow. She suggested this
under the pretense that Mary and Goodwin must be bored, but, in truth,
she was suspicious of their long stay at the inn and their many walks

126 Chapter 8
abroad. Mary was known to many in the area from her previous visits to
the Lowlanders, and the couple were becoming the common talk of the
country. The landlady often walked close by the four trees on her way to
fetch her cow, and Mary knew that if she saw them kneeling down with
their ears to the ground, they would be accused of being common conjur-
ers, an accusation that Mary particularly loathed. So it was safer to be in
the woman’s company and then see her on her way home than to be spied
upon. But by the time the woman had milked her cow and put it once
again to pasture, it was past 5:55 and they had missed their opportunity
for that month.
The new moon on the 10th of October fell at two o’clock in the
morning. In addition to the inconvenient time, George brought them news
that a Lowlander priest had made a pact with the evil spirits to attack Mary
if she attempted to retrieve the treasure. Once again, Mary and Goodwin’s
hopes were dashed.
The new moon in November was conveniently at 1:26 in the after-
noon of the 8th. Mary and Goodwin laid the hazel wands and the parch-
ment and prayed to God that the ground might open up. As the ground
cracked beneath them, a man on a horse came down the road. Afraid
of being discovered, Mary panicked and snatched up the parchment and
sticks. The window of opportunity, as well as the ground, was again closed.
On December 8, the constant rains had caused the composition of
the earth to be altered to such a state that the spirits could not deliver any
treasure. By January, the frost deterred them. And by February, the heath
was a sheet of ice. The treasure at the four trees would have to wait until
spring. But in April of 1684 there was too much rain. In May, Father Fryar
misplaced the wands; in June, the rains returned; and in July, Goodwin had
to attend his father.
So in August of 1684, more than a year after they first discovered
the treasure site, the couple took another approach and decided to banish
the evil spirits. Mary and Goodwin had been advised not to treat human
spirits as harshly as demons, since humans still had to face the Lord on the
judgment day. So they banished the eight evil spirits of men into Windsor
Forest for just six months. The methods of controlling demons described
in grimoires were adapted from Catholic exorcism rituals, illustrating how
blurry the line was between magic and religion at this time. To be rid of
the three demons, Gabetius, Hyadromicon, and Belsacanom (to my knowl-
edge, the names are not listed in any extant grimoires), Goodwin encircled

the place three times and commanded the devils to depart in the name of
God and be banished to hell forever. Goodwin’s description of the event is
in keeping with instructions in magic manuals, which recommend excom-
municating noncompliant spirits with harsh words: “I excommunicate
thee and deprive thee from all thy dignities to the deepest pit in Hell and
there shalt thou remain in everlasting chains, in fire and brimstone, where
shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth forever.”20 One of the demons in
the form of a great, black dog threatened to attack Mary, but this only
made Goodwin more determined to dispatch him. But as pleased as they
were at successfully banishing the evil spirits, their actions did not get them
any closer to the treasure.
Months stretched into years as Mary and Goodwin attempted to
retrieve the treasure at Hounslow Heath. Meanwhile, other treasure-
hunting opportunities presented themselves. Mary suggested that they try
to retrieve riches from a place her grandfather had shown her at Northend,
a village close to her hometown of Turville. Grandfather West was the
second husband of Mary’s grandmother. One day, while he was searching
in the commons for a suitable place to dig a charcoal pit, his spade struck
the rim of an iron pot. When he dug it out, he found that it was filled with
gold and silver. Bit by bit, he carried the treasure home, not even telling his
wife about his discovery. Upon cleaning and polishing the pot, he discov-
ered the words, “Where this pot doth lye: there stands a better by.”21 When
Mary was six or seven years old, he showed her the special place, less than
a mile from his house. Mary maintained that it was this serendipitous trea-
sure that allowed him to live like a rich country yeoman. The story of bur-
ied treasure may have been a way to explain his good fortune, or perhaps
he had really stumbled upon one of the many Roman burial sites in the
area that contained bronze and copper coins.22 Either way, this mysterious
tale kindled a lifetime quest in an impressionable young girl.
In August 1683, Mary and Goodwin took the stagecoach as far as
Slough in pursuit of this treasure. From there, they hired an old cart horse
to travel the remaining sixteen miles to Northend. The last leg of the jour-
ney passed through a dense, dark forest, where the light barely penetrated
20. BL Sloane 1727, fol. 8, Secreta Secretorum.

22. Roman settlements existed around Weston Turville and Fingest from 55 BCE to 409 CE. Burial
sites contain glass, bronze, and pottery; Roman copper coins were found in the area in 1772. Reed,
History of Buckinghamshire, 27.

128 Chapter 8
even at high noon. The many crossroads in the path made it difficult to
know whether they were continuing forward or heading back. By the time
the track finally opened onto a wide common, the night was pitch black.
Mary was fit to be tied, having wanted to stop much earlier. She threatened
to jump off the horse, on which they rode tandem, and go back through
the woods on foot. Eventually, Goodwin persuaded her to continue until
they reached a public house. The inn did not have a room for them, but
the master of the house could see that Mary was very near exhaustion. He
offered her his own bed, a practice that was not uncommon for the time.
While Mary slept soundly beside the man’s wife, Goodwin played at a
game of push-pin with the publican until he fell asleep in his chair.
The next morning, the couple headed for the place in the commons
where Mary’s grandfather had allegedly found the iron pot full of gold and
silver. Kneeling down at the spot with her ear to the ground, Mary bid the
spirit that guarded the treasure to speak to her, which it did in a deep, hol-
low voice. The spirit told her that there was also an evil spirit that guarded
the treasure, and that the spirit went abroad every Monday at six o’clock
in the evening, at which time Mary could gladly have whatever she wished.
But Mary could not face the thought of repeating the exhausting journey a
week later. Although it was a Tuesday, she told the spirit she would have the
treasure then and there; she started to scratch at the surface of the ground
with her bare hands. The spirit pulled her about by the hood of her cloak,
which provided one of many opportunities for Goodwin to come to her
rescue and pull her free of the spirit’s grasp.
The next Sunday, they repeated the journey, with plans to reach
Marlow by the evening, which was within five miles of the treasure site.
For a few days before, Mary had experienced some shooting pains in her
head. The couple attributed the problem to those cold winter nights when
she had sat up waiting for her first husband, Mr. Boucher, to come home;
as a result, she was almost deaf in one ear. But not being one to dwell on
her own health, she had not given much thought to her discomfort. How-
ever, the motion of the horse increased the shooting pains and about four
miles from Slough, she was forced to dismount. She prodded her ear with
her finger and, to her surprise, blood trickled out. Goodwin could see that
there was an “impostume,” or abscess, in her ear that was ready to break.
He suggested they go back to Maidenhead, which they had just passed,
and stay the night. But Mary was determined to reach Northend at the
appointed time on Monday, even if she had to crawl on her hands and

knees to do so. Goodwin knew there was no use arguing with her when
she was strong-minded, so they crept on. The sun was making its descent
by the time Goodwin led their old rented nag down a steep hill outside
Marlow. He became extremely concerned when Mary suddenly dropped
from the horse in a swoon. After she gained consciousness, she barely had
enough reserve to walk the rest of the way into town.
Both Mary and Goodwin were knowledgeable in physic, and they
suspected that if the abscess was not pulled away as soon as it ruptured,
Mary risked death from the poison entering her brain. Goodwin anxiously
kept vigil while she dozed fitfully. In a couple of hours, he heard a crack
like a small twig breaking and putrid matter was discharged from Mary’s
ear. He carefully removed the ruptured sack. Although the immediate dan-
ger had passed, Mary was still weak and could not rise from her bed the
next morning. They stayed in Marlow for the next couple of days before
returning to Hounslow.
In some cases, it appears that Mary is purposely manipulating sit-
uations to create delays to keep Goodwin interested until she can pro-
cure some future reward. But in many cases, delays were caused by events
that were beyond her control. She could hardly have planned to have an
abscess in her ear rupture on the way to a treasure site. Or arrange for
heavy rains to conveniently flood Hounslow Heath, for that matter. It is
highly possible that Mary interpreted such occurrences as divine interven-
tion, just as Goodwin did.
Over the course of the next decade, Mary and Goodwin discovered
many other places in and around London where they hoped to procure
some wealth. There was a charming little house on the edge of Hounslow
where the spirits told them an iron pot, buried in the orchard, contained
£250, a delicately wrought brass saddle, and a silver cup. In London, there
were treasure sites at various locations: a house in Covent Garden; a private
garden at Somerset House; and outside in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, Leicester
Fields, Southampton Square, St. James’s Park near the Pall Mall, and Red
Lion Fields. Part of the treasure in Red Lion Fields was at the site of an old
monastery, where Goodwin said “some projectors were a-digging for it”
and had already uncovered an ivory cross.23 At St. James’s, the spirits told
Mary that there was enough treasure for as long as she lived, if she would

130 Chapter 8
punctually pick it up every day. For several years, Mary delivered empty
bags to one or more of these places on a daily basis. As soon as she laid the
bag down on the ground, it immediately disappeared, to be filled by the
spirits and later delivered to the closet in Mary and Goodwin’s lodgings.
A common route for her to travel in a day was from their rooms at Long
Acre to Red Lion Fields, then on to St. Paul’s, the parish church of Covent
Garden, then over to St. James’s Park, and back home. Given the damp
English weather, she often returned weary, sick, and wet with “her feet so
swell’d that she durst not pull off her shoes for fear of not getting them on
again.” On these occasions, Goodwin played the role of nursemaid, “tak-
ing all the care of her, and giving her all the comfort and encouragement”
he could.24 Through their innumerable trials and tribulations, the couple’s
relationship moved beyond a business partnership, and even beyond sim-
ply being lovers.
Of all the treasure sites the couple explored over the course of two
decades, two in particular stand out. In March 1686, Mary was instructed
by the spirit realm to go to a cellar known as “the cardinal’s cellar” in the
general vicinity of Old Fish Street. An anecdote relating to patents for wine
indicates that the area may have had a reputation for buried treasure. In
a discussion between two entrepreneurs, one of the men claimed that an
alderman who kept the Ship tavern behind Old Fish Street became rich
from finding hidden treasure in a vault near his cellar called “the cardinal’s
cellar.”25 The particular cellar Mary was directed to was located under a
tavern called the Queen’s Head. The privy was in the cellar, which offered
Mary an excuse to frequent it. In the damp underground cavern, Mary
encountered the spirit of the former archbishop of York, Cardinal Thomas
Wolsey. Mary watched as the cardinal, in his familiar square cap and red
gown, performed mass in the cellar with a “very fine altar, & fine orna-
ments.”26 Wolsey is best known for his failure to procure a divortio for Henry
VIII so that the king could marry Anne Boleyn. He initially told Mary
that after she visited him five times, she would receive a great treasure,
including a Japanese chest full of gold, a triple crown (probably meaning a
three-tiered crown as worn by the pope), and a mitre. During the summer
of 1686, Mary returned to the cellar many times without recompense, even
24. Ibid., 1:173.

25. Thornbury, Old and New London, 22.

when the cardinal was threatened with banishment to hell or to the Red
Sea. At the beginning of the relationship, the cardinal did not like Good-
win and constantly advised Mary to leave him, but eventually he became
more kind and even agreed to help them retrieve the treasure in Hounslow.
The cardinal was not the only difficult spirit Mary had to deal with.
Whenever the guardian spirits of the treasure sites were vexed, they chal-
lenged Mary, calling her “bitch” and “whore” and even striking physi-
cal blows. On one occasion, the spirits at St. James’s seemingly carried
her “into the earth” where they threatened her “with clubs and staves”
and “the devil himself pull[ed] her about by the arm.”27 These reports
contributed to Goodwin’s appreciation of Mary’s efforts on the couple’s
behalf. The worst treatment Mary received was at a certain house in Rat-
cliff, which she discovered in July of 1686. Ratcliff was a small hamlet on
the north side of the Thames, just outside the walls of the City of London,
on the east side of the Tower. Mary often traveled there by water, probably
taking boat at the pier located at the end of Old Swan Lane running south
of Thames Street, just west of London Bridge. As the first landfall for ships
entering the Thames, Ratcliff was a seafaring community, peppered with
taverns, brothels, gambling houses, and bowling allies.28 Mary was directed
to a dark, underground room, where she found urns filled with cremated
remains, old medals, and the Philosopher’s Stone, a precious powder used
in alchemical works. She was instructed to place her hand in the bin of
powder, even though the place appeared to be “full of great monstrous
serpents, snakes and toads: which lay warbling and heaving and rolling
one amongst another, as if thousands of them were there.” She was told
that the snakes would not harm her and that anyone desiring the powder
must first go through them. But when she put her hand in, the snakes
“swelled and rise up against her, and one of them fastened upon her hand
and twisted up all about her arm.”29 Fervent prayer to God garnered her
release, but she went away fuming, with her hand and arm numb.
The snakes and toads were evil spirits, the chief of which was the
ghost of a Lowlander, Thomas Shashbesh, who controlled not only the
treasure site at Ratcliff but also several others. At one point, Shashbesh
asked for Mary’s hand in marriage, in exchange for making her the richest
27. Ibid., 1:347.

28. Stowe, Survey of London, 3:72, 3:367–68.

132 Chapter 8
woman in the world. In response, Goodwin was forced to banish the evil
spirit to St. James’s Park for six weeks, so that Mary would no longer “be
troubled with serpents at Ratcliff.” Although Goodwin could not hear it,
the spirit made a great grumbling noise upon his departure. Immediately
after banishing the spirit, Goodwin and Mary “came home, and this very
night she conceiv’d again.”30 Metaphorically, Goodwin had sacrificed the
serpent, a common (phallic) symbol of the devil, and usurped the spirit’s
sexuality, which was threatening Mary’s virtue (or at the very least, was
competition to Goodwin’s role as Mary’s lover). The spirit world provided
Goodwin, as the hero of Mary’s narrative, many opportunities to confront
his fears and prove his manhood. Mary’s hand and arm eventually healed
with the application of a plaster and Goodwin’s prayers, but she continued
to be troubled with nightmares of snakes. The next time she went to Rat-
cliff, she was tormented by howling and shrieking shapes, which lifted her
up by her waist and shook her like a leaf. When she was set down on the
ground again, forty great toads crawled upon her.
***
Certain elements of Mary’s construction of the spirit world may have been
as a result of her actual physical and mental experiences. For instance,
the appearance of snakes could have been directly linked to a traumatic
experience she had as a young girl, dozing in the grass in the hazy heat of
a summer day. A venomous snake (probably the twenty-to thirty-inch-long
common adder, Vipera berus) slithered through the long grass and fastened
itself onto the back of her hand. An old servant fetched a broom and
brushed it off, but not before she was bitten. Mary’s arm swelled up all the
way to her shoulder. Her family feared she might die before any medical
help could be fetched. Luckily, Mary’s mother was familiar enough with
herbal lore to relieve the tenderness and inflammation with decoctions of
sage leaves boiled in white wine, which would have satisfied the contempo-
rary botanist Culpeper.31
Mary’s chronic alcoholism may have also colored her adverse
experiences with the spirit world. Mary had favored brandy over meat
30. Ibid., 1:294.


in the year or so before she met Goodwin, and her health had deterio-
rated drastically as a result. Goodwin made a start to her recovery by
removing her from her old haunts and keeping her from the company
of those friends who “over persuaded her” to stay out drinking.32 But
two years into their relationship, Mary’s guardian spirits were still rep-
rimanding her for the ill company she kept and were advising her to
drink wine rather than brandy, which “flew to her head.” Goodwin
attributed her frequent bouts of “disorder” to the innocence and weak-
ness of her temper (being too good-natured to refuse an invitation from
her cronies), combined with the great troubles they continually faced.
The episodes of “disorder” continued, and by the spring of 1686,
Mary was advised by the spirit world to make a written contract with
Goodwin to stop drinking. Apparently, this did not work either. In the
summer of 1686, during the same period that she was being tormented
by snakes and toads at Ratcliff, she frequently came home “in a great
disorder of mind, fury and trouble.” Her long treks on foot from one
treasure site to another, often without food or drink, prompted her to
stop and “refresh” herself with a little claret or brandy “to keep up
her spirits.”33 In fact, the day before the toad episode, she had been in
the company of her female friends all day (implying a drunken state).
And during a binge of three or four consecutive days of drinking and
suffering hangovers, she reported that she was attacked at Ratcliff by
a furious goat with one bent horn. Not only did Mary cause Goodwin
“a great deal of torment by her passion” when she was drunk, 34 but on
at least one occasion, she got involved in fisticuffs with another woman
and came home with a bruised face.
Delusions or frightening hallucinations, both tactile and visual, can
result from long periods of drinking followed by alcohol withdrawal, a
condition commonly known as the D.T.’s (delirium tremens). Symptoms
are commonly worse in older individuals like Mary who suffer from poor
diet, generally poor health, and prolonged use of alcohol. Within three to
thirty-six hours after the last drink, a person can experience visions that
frequently involve snakes and spiders.35

33. Ibid., 1:293.
34. Ibid., 1:347.
35. Sachse, “Emergency: Delirium Tremens.”

134 Chapter 8
A secondary complication that arises when a person substitutes alco-

hol for food is vitamin deficiency. Lack of niacin, one of the B vitamins,
can result in a disease called pellagra. Pellagra was first diagnosed in the
eighteenth century in Asturias, a kingdom on the northern shore of Spain,
and was associated with the introduction of maize from the New World. In
the twentieth century, pellagra was linked to malnutrition and poverty in
the American South, as a result of poor-quality diets that were dependent
on cereals. Symptoms include dementia, dermatitis, and diarrhea. In the
later stages, the disease can cause melancholia, depression, delusions of
persecution, suicidal tendencies, and other neurological disturbances, all
of which Mary suffered.36
Alcoholism and any related medical conditions were entangled
with Mary’s frequent bouts of depression and melancholy, which were
blamed on the couple’s constant setbacks and desperate financial situa-
tion. Goodwin reported that she often wandered around the city when
she got distracted by “melancholy musing.” As early as the fall of 1683,
Mary was determined “to kill herself with grief.” On one occasion,
she attempted to commit suicide by setting a small dagger on the bed
and thrusting her body on it. Fortunately, Goodwin arrived in time and
struck the weapon away. This method of self-destruction had been pre-
saged a few months earlier when the imprisoned Lowlander princess
stabbed herself in the heart with a gold bodkin in a bid for attention.
As a penance, the spirits led Mary on a grueling marathon all over Lon-
don, tempting her to drown herself in the pond in St. James’s Park or
in the Thames. By the time she reached home, she could not move or
speak and fell into a fit, grinding her teeth and moaning lamentably.
On other occasions, she tore “her hair and head clothes all to pieces
like a madwoman” while she was out in the fields.37 When the spirits
told her that her life was soon to be snatched away, Mary expressed “an
unusual heaviness upon her” and a desire to die.38 Sometimes her men-
tal anguish was accompanied with physical symptoms of alcohol abuse,
as when she suffered from loose bowels and vomiting all night followed
by “a decay of spirits.”39
36. Roe, Plague of Corn, 1–7.

37. Ibid., 1:254, 104, 243.
38. Ibid., 1:249.
39. Ibid., 2:18.

Goodwin got so desperate that he was tempted to administer the

drastic cure of drowning an eel in brandy for Mary to drink, a cure rec-
ommended by Culpeper: “Eels, being put into wine or beer, and suffered
to die in it, he that drinks it will never endure that sort of liquor again.”40
The modern physician Seamus Mac Suibhne suggests that Culpeper’s
concoction had a similar effect to a modern chemical that is prescribed as
a deterrent for alcoholics.41
All this is not to suggest that Mary’s construction of the spirit realm
was simply a product of her alcohol abuse, but when Mary went through
the looking glass, she took her physical body with her, which necessarily
contributed to how the alternate world manifested itself to her. We can
question whether Mary’s melancholy was a genuine exhibition of depres-
sion or a clever exercise in reverse psychology. Attempted suicide and
expressions of self-loathing are typical of clinically depressed persons. And
a message delivered to a partner via the spirit world would be just as effec-
tive as a diary left out in the open as a call for help. Whether sincere or not,
these occasions served as opportunities for Mary to not only confess her
willingness to die for Goodwin’s sake (and come back as a familiar spirit),
but also to chastise him for his behavior toward her. On several occasions,
the spirits instructed him to be “kind, true, tender, and free” to her, in the
face of her many trials and tribulations.42 These incidents also granted
Goodwin an opportunity to demonstrate his concern for Mary. After she
tramped from one end of London to the other, he would pull off her shoes
and massage her feet. And when she would cry with disappointment, com-
plaining that they would never succeed in their undertakings, Goodwin
would comfort her. How could he possibly conceive of her actively imped-
ing their projects?
In any case, eventually Goodwin’s prayers were answered, and by
the spring of 1688, Mary developed such an aversion to brandy that she
could not endure it even for medicinal purposes. Clearheaded, she contin-
ued her daily walks to the various treasure sites to deliver the money bags.
40. Culpeper, Complete Herbal, 252.

41. The chemical disulfiram is an ingredient that is used in manufacturing synthetic rubber and also
causes a pharmacotherapeutic aversion to alcohol. See Mac Suibhne, “Commentary: Nicholas Cul-
peper, Eels and Disulfiram.”

Chapter 9
Heavenly Hosts
In Mary’s complex world, her familiar spirit, George, was not the only
supernatural entity she interacted with. Treasure hunting had introduced
the couple to many spirits of deceased persons and a few hellish demons.
Seventeenth-century England was populated by a vast array of spirits. The
term “spirit” covered a wide range of entities in the early modern lexicon,
making the word extremely ambiguous. There were ghosts, or “souls of
men,” to consider, like George. The official Protestant opinion, which dis-
missed the idea of purgatory, maintained that souls went directly to heaven
or hell and could not return to earth.1 The seventeenth-century noncon-
formist minister Richard Baxter argued that ghost stories (like Mary’s story
about Laud) were popish propaganda: “And though many are said to have
begged of the Living for Mastes [masses] and Prayers, it is liker to prove a
Diabolical Cheat, to promote Superstition, than that there is a Purgatory-
State of Hope.”2 Nevertheless, at the popular level, there was still a firm
belief that the deceased could haunt the earth. Sometimes, this was even
linked to the location of treasure.
You have heard of spirits for to walk,

though many be, you He’r did see,
And with some men do seem to talk
about their hidden treasurie.3
1. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 587–95.

3. Anon., Strange and Wonderful News from Northampton-Shire.
136

Heavenly Hosts 137
The spirit world also included innumerable intermediary beings that

resided halfway between heaven and hell, similar to the elemental spirits
described by Paracelsus. Richard Baxter discussed these sorts of “wights,”
which were a sort of fairy creature.4 The spirits conjured up by magicians
during formal magic rituals were usually angels or demons. Theologically,
demons were fallen angels, but the word was applied to any sort of evil
spirit, including malevolent ghosts and witches’ familiars.
A year into his partnership with Mary, Goodwin recalled a discus-
sion he had had with a man who claimed to have conversation with a
good angel. Goodwin had learned the technique of invocation from his
friend and had had some limited success in the matter before he met Mary.
Invoking spirits was practiced by a wide range of people, including cun-
ning folk, physicians, divines, and learned men. Invoking the assistance of
angels or divine beings was known as “theurgy.” With Christian prayers
and petitions, the magician invited the good spirit to appear, for the pur-
pose of increasing his knowledge, including the knowledge of where to
find buried treasure. A reflective object such as a crystal ball, a looking
glass, or simply a glass of water was often used as a medium to contain the
angel for the purpose of conversation. For the most part, theurgy was con-
sidered distinctly different from necromancy, which employed elaborate
ritual preparations, casting of circles, and conjurations to raise demonic
spirits or spirits of the dead, often for the purpose of revenge or love
magic. Seventeenth-century practitioners of theurgy did not see any con-
flict between their magical practice and their Christian devotion; in fact, in
many cases, it was an extension of their religion.5 Of course, angels could
also appear to a person unsolicited and of their own volition. This manner
of appearance usually had more religious significance than magical.
One method of communicating with the spirit world was the art of
scrying, or seeing images in a medium. Scrying was traditionally done by
a virgin child old enough to take direction but pure enough to be open to
divine revelation. Some instruction manuals recommended the employ-
ment of a little boy or girl, and other grimoires instructed the magician on
how to obtain “angel sight” for a child acting as a scryer.6 But finding and

5. For the development of theurgy in Europe from the Middle Ages to the early modern period, see
Fanger, “Introduction: Theurgy, Magic, and Mysticism,” 15–27.
6. Butler, Ritual Magic, 51; BL Add. MS 36674, fol. 85v.

138 Chapter 9
employing a child scryer was an inconvenience that could not be overcome

easily and on a regular basis. One day it came into Goodwin’s head that
perhaps virginity could be obtained by proxy. That is, since children influ-
enced their mothers’ bodies, he reasoned that a pregnant woman would
receive “imputative virginity” via her unborn child.7 He immediately
tested his theory on Mary, who was in her seventh month of pregnancy at
the time. Using a glass of clean water, Goodwin invoked the name of Uriel
as he had been taught. A typical invocation would be,
Babel, Gabriel, Rachel, Sara, Isaac, Joseph, and Jacob. I

charge you by these holy names of God: Elo, Elo, Goby, Goby,
Emanuel, Emanuel, Tetragrammaton, Tetragrammaton. As
you shall answer before Jesus Christ at the great and dread-
ful day of Judgment, show me all that I shall ask or demand
faithfully and truly within this Glass without any delusion or
dissimulation. I charge you and command you and bind you
that you come into this Glass and bring all that do belong unto
you for to show me anything that I shall ask or desire that I
may plainly behold it with my mortal eyes.8
Mary immediately saw a cloud in the water and then the angel appeared
in the glass as a beautiful youth.
The angel who appeared to Mary was Uriel. At first Uriel could not
speak to Mary, but within a few days, he was able to communicate perfectly.
He confirmed Goodwin’s theory: Mary was blessed with the purity and vir-
ginity of her two unborn sons, which enabled her to see an angel of God.
Uriel assured them that in the future they did not require elaborate invoca-
tions to summon him but needed only to say “Pray, Uriel, come,” and he
would be at their service. Uriel was generally considered to be one of the
four archangels who acted as messengers and sometimes soldiers of God.
By the Middle Ages, Uriel had made his way from Jewish apocryphal liter-
ature, such as the Book of Enoch, to magical texts such as the Testament of
Solomon.9 He is not mentioned in the Bible, but is one of the many magical
entities to be called up by magicians that are listed in grimoires.
7. Autobiography of Goodwin Wharton, 1:119. The influence of the unborn child in divination is
evident in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Hebrew manuscripts, as discussed in Daiches, Babylonian
Oil Magic, 23, 38.
8. BL Sloane 3851, fol. 53.
9. Kieckhefer, Forbidden Rites, 161.

Heavenly Hosts 139
Uriel was one of the several spirits with whom the Elizabethan
magus John Dee and his scryer Edward Kelly communicated in the six-
teenth century. Dee is a good example of the sort of person who prac-
ticed magic. He was not a marginal member of society: he had studied at
Cambridge University; by the age of twenty-four, he had lectured abroad;
he had selected the most favorable day for Queen Elizabeth’s coronation;
and he was frequently consulted for navigational advice concerning the
northwest passage by leading explorers on account of his extensive math-
ematical and astronomical knowledge.10 Dee had died two decades before
Mary was born, but his reputation outlived him. His angel conversations
had been made public in 1659 by the Genevan-born scholar-turned Angli-
can divine Méric Casaubon, who published a portion of Dee’s notebook.11
As someone who moved in occult circles, it is highly likely that Mary was
aware of Dee and Kelly’s reputations, if not their angel conversations.
Over the following years, Mary and Goodwin reenacted some of Dee’s
practices, including the idea that the couple would be given “a new pecu-
liar language,” reminiscent of the Enochian language dictated to Kelly in
the scrying stone they used.12
Once the portal to the world of angels was opened, Mary soon
encountered several more. Within a short time, Uriel brought another
angel into the glass of water. Although Uriel had been created as an angel
at the beginning of the world, he was an “out-Angel,” who did not reside
continually in heaven. Therefore, his power was limited. The new angel,
Ahab, had been an Israelite in Egypt, before Moses led them into the desert.
Because he had lived exceedingly well, he had immediately gone to heaven
when he died and had become an angel. Unlike Uriel, who required a vir-
gin scryer, Ahab had the ability to appear to Mary even when she was not
pregnant, although they would soon discover that her postpartum bleed-
ing would prove to be a deterrent because of traditional Jewish menstrual
taboos. The couple kept glasses of water in several places around their
lodging, ready for immediate use. They even had a portable “violl bottle”
of water for Ahab when they were on the road.13 As per Ahab’s instruc-
tions, they added lemon juice to keep the water fresh and sweet.
10. For a full discussion of Dee’s life, see Clulee, John Dee’s Natural Philosophy; French, John Dee; Harkness,
John Dee’s Conversations with Angels; Szonyi, John Dee’s Occultism.
11. Dee, True and Faithful Relation . . . , ed. Casaubon.
13. Ibid., 1:122, 142.

140 Chapter 9
There is a built-in paradox concerning scrying. The angel or spirit

invoked into the medium by the magician could not necessarily be seen by
him. The reason that young women and children were considered partic-
ularly suitable for the job of scrying was their supposed qualities of irra-
tionality and vulnerability. But in spite of the perceived inferiority of the
scryer, the magus was completely at her or his mercy. Although Goodwin
had been the one to invoke Uriel into the glass, he could neither see nor
hear him. Goodwin could occasionally hear Ahab speaking softly to Mary,
but he could not make out the words. Even when the spirits spoke directly
to him, Goodwin could seldom understand the words clearly and relied on
Ahab to interpret what was said. The scryer (Mary) ultimately controlled
the transmission of information to the magician (Goodwin). Keep in mind
that this was, supposedly, all Goodwin’s idea. But Mary wasn’t the only one
who contributed to the angel’s messages. Goodwin’s responses to the spirit
world shaped future messages as well as subsequent interpretations by the
other spirits (via Mary).14
Goodwin kept “a very great globular glass” on his side of the bed,
in hopes that the angels would appear to him. Occasionally, he perceived a
“little small round light” like a sun in the glass, but he was never able to see
the angels. To facilitate vision, Ahab advised Goodwin to try a treatment of
eyedrops known as “oculus Christi.”15 Although a great deal of glutinous
matter was discharged from his eyes, Goodwin was still unable to see any
spirits. Mary also had a recipe for an ointment that facilitated the seeing of
spirits, which she had used before she met Goodwin. The oil was concocted
from a crested-headed member of the plover family called a lapwing, which
was killed in June at a particular astrological time. By some miraculous and
unspecified manner, this bird engendered another bird, which was fattened
up and rendered into an oil used to anoint the eyes. Unfortunately, Good-
win was never able to procure the bird at the correct time.
By the middle of May, the archangel Gabriel also appeared in the
glass. In October of 1684, the Jewish angel Ahab introduced Michael,
the chief of the archangels. (Michael and Gabriel are the only angels
mentioned by name in the Old Testament.) Shortly thereafter, two cher-
ubim also visited the couple’s lodging. Cherubim belonged to the highest
14. A similar assessment was done concerning the angel conversations of Dee and Kelly. See Harkness,
“Shows in the Showstone,” 720, 737.
15. Autobiography of Goodwin Wharton, 1:167, 122.

Heavenly Hosts 141
heavenly realm. They guarded God’s throne, as well as the tree of life in
the Garden of Eden.16 By May 1685, the couple were honored with visits
from the ultimate order of the celestial hierarchy, the seraphim, who sur-
rounded God’s throne. The spirits of St. Paul and St. Luke also made brief
appearances, but they were soon overshadowed when the Lord himself
started speaking directly to Goodwin on May 19, 1685. It is not made clear
whether “the Lord” refers to the Father, the Son, or God as a trinity. But he
was presented by Goodwin as the ultimate being.
Each of the spirits had a distinctive voice: Michael spoke with “a
great manly deep voice”; Gabriel had “a thin high one”; the seraphim
had “very shrill” voices;17 the cherubim spoke in rhyme and sometimes
sang long psalms; and the Lord usually had a very low voice, often diffi-
cult to understand. Sometimes the angels called to Goodwin from his bed,
but more often the voices came from the place where Mary was sitting
behind him as he prayed, or from behind the door to her room, the dining
room, or the hallway, depending on their lodging. On one occasion, Good-
win noted that when Mary was in the room, her lips moved at the same
time that the angels spoke. His first inclination was to think that the angels
spoke through her as demons speak through a possessed person. But when
he dared to suggest that Mary was the one who was speaking, the angels
threatened to not reappear for seven years because of his lack of faith.
Mary offered the simple explanation that her lips moved because she was
praying to herself while the angels were present in the room. Eventually,
Goodwin was able to set aside his suspicions so that the angels would con-
tinue to visit him.
One of the first things the angels did was to instruct the couple to
construct an altar in the spacious “closet” in Mary’s room. During this
period, “closet” referred to any small room that was used for privacy or
private devotion. It was frequently a place where curiosities or valuables
were housed.18 On a small table covered with a clean cloth, Goodwin set
a portable writing desk to create an elevated area. This escritoire was cov-
ered with a cloth and surrounded by four wax candles. The whole affair
was decorated with artificial flowers carved from horn, augmented with
fresh flowers in season. Glasses of water continually sat on the altar for
16. Gen. 3:22; Exod. 25:18; Ezek. 10:14; Davidson, Dictionary of Angels.
18. OED, s.v. “closet”; Picard, Restoration London, 37.

142 Chapter 9
the convenience of the angels. Over the course of several years, Good-
win knelt on a small cushion in front of this homemade altar for many
hours each day, while Mary roamed the streets of London delivering her
money bags. The altar became the focus of Goodwin’s world and served
as his personal chapel. Mary gave Goodwin an alternative, concrete world
within the walls of their lowly lodging. Goodwin’s personal chapel kept
him off the streets and safe from arrest for his debts while Mary mended
his self-esteem.
Over time, the space was elaborately decorated with Catholic rega-
lia, such as pictures painted on vellum of saints, the Trinity, the Virgin
Mary, and Mary Magdalene. On the lower part of the altar, the couple
placed boxes of unleavened wafers of the type used in Catholic mass,
which were occasionally consecrated by the angels and placed on the
higher part of the altar. The Catholic nature of the altar was a constant
concern to Goodwin, who had been raised in a Protestant nonconformist
household. In the case of the wafers, Gabriel assured Goodwin that con-
secration did not result in transubstantiation, as the Catholics believed.
And the numerous paintings were simply reminders of the Lord’s suffering
rather than idolatrous icons.
When the couple moved to Long Acre in January 1685, they lined
the narrow closet with newly painted paper and hung linen curtains over
the doorway, so that visitors might think it was just a clothes closet. The
absence of a wooden door was also for the convenience of the angels,
who regularly brought religious items to the altar. Over the course of the
years, hundreds of artifacts were deposited in the closet. The items ranged
from simple things, such as a sprig of rosemary, a lump of incense, and
a delicate silver medal with the Savior on one side and a crucifix on the
other, to more elaborate objects such as a round, white container with the
resurrection scene carved on the lid, which contained relics in the form of
clots of Christ’s blood preserved at the time of the crucifixion. At the time
of delivery, one of the pieces of flesh or dried blood was still wet. Fresh
drops of blood also appeared on a delicate gold and silver crucifix and in
the bottle of scrying water, and enough blood gushed from a ruby-red,
heart-shaped locket to soak through two napkins.
Aside from the fresh blood, the first thing one notes about these
items is their Catholic nature. Protestants considered relics and devotional
items of this sort as idolatrous popery. Luther had scorned the idea that
grace could be acquired via physical objects or any form of performance,

Heavenly Hosts 143
allocating relics and icons to the domain of magic.19 Nevertheless, a variety

of items like this were still sold in England by wandering petty chapmen,
who obtained them from the Continent or from visiting Jesuits. Stationers
also sold pictures of saints painted on cloth or paper.20 On one occasion,
the angels delivered to Goodwin a large, black-framed painting of the cru-
cifixion in the style of the Flemish baroque painter Rubens, which was not
yet dry. Certainly it was more than coincidence that an artist occupied the
ground-floor shop of the couple’s lodging. Mary explained that there were
all sorts of spirits that could perform a wide variety of tasks, including the
mundane task of purchasing things in the marketplace.
The spirits also brought things not directly related to the altar. Bot-
tles of wine were supplied to take with medicinal drops, and a book of
charms gave helpful advice against imprisonment (of which Goodwin was
constantly at risk because of his debts). Two uncut diamonds, a long stalk
of rubies, a natural uncut sapphire, and an amethyst were given simply
for encouragement. And Goodwin received several snuffboxes, because
he was very fond of snuff. The New World practice of sniffing ground
tobacco had become popular in England by the mid-seventeenth century.
Frequently, the angels also removed things from the altar. As many
as nine hundred Eucharist wafers disappeared: Goodwin was instructed
to buy more. One wonders if Mary was using the wafers for some magical
purpose. The consecrated communion wafer was widely believed to have
curative properties. Ever since the Middle Ages, they had been smug-
gled out of church by laypeople to be used illegitimately.21 Perhaps as a
cunning woman raised in Catholicism, Mary had the use of consecrated
wafers as part of her repertoire. On the other hand, Goodwin comments
on the activity of rats in the closet, who were probably not particular
about whether their communion bread was meant for Catholics or Angli-
cans. But rats don’t explain the removal of at least three quires (a bundle
of seventy-two sheets) of writing paper. A silver medal was also removed
to be turned into gold, and “a parcel of fine water gold,” which Good-
win had bought for an alchemical experiment, was redeemed to make a
19. Kolb, Martin Luther, 66.

20. Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 178–79, 192.
21. See Grendon, “Anglo-Saxon Charms”; Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 35. Scot reports
how Catholics could allegedly cure a sick man with “a wafer cake”; Discoverie of Witchcraft, ed. Sum-
mers, bk. 12, chap. 14, p. 141. William Monter discusses how French shepherds were frequently ac-
cused of witchcraft because of their sacrilegious use of the eucharist; “Toads and Eucharists.”

144 Chapter 9
seraph’s head.22 The angel Gabriel took a gold medal that Philip Wharton
had given Goodwin as a token when he went to France. Given Mary’s pre-
vious history of buying and selling textiles, we might interpret this as yet
another tactic in her makeshift economic strategy, a sort of reserve bank
account. In any case, by the end of October 1687, the Lord had declared
that these trinkets were merely for amusement, as the true covenant was
written in Goodwin’s heart. No more things would be bought, and he was
directed to sell some items.
Whether the angels were heavenly entities delivering divine wisdom
or conscious constructions by Mary, they were understood by Goodwin
as a sign of divine favor. The real work of the angels and the altar was to
reinforce Goodwin’s role as the chosen one, which, in turn, gave him the
confidence to face his father and re-enter the world of politics. To assist
him in conversing with the spirits, he wore a holy breastplate and girdle at
all times under his clothes. The breastplate, or lamin, which hung around
his neck in a covering of crimson velvet, consisted of a large oval plate
(cast by Jesus himself) engraved with the crucifixion scene and the words
“Mors mea—vita tua” (Death to me—life to you). This is reminiscent of
the triangular, gold breastplate, inscribed with certain sigils, that the angels
had instructed John Dee to make as a talisman against evil.23 In addition
to the breastplate, Goodwin wore a holy girdle of delicate crimson cloth,
with which the Virgin Mary had swaddled the baby Jesus when they fled
into Egypt.
In the summer of 1684, Ahab ordained Goodwin as a priest and
prophet, which would aid in his curing of diseases and enable him to conse-
crate items required for the couple’s many projects. Ahab directed him con-
cerning what words to say, and Mary saw Ahab’s hand come out of the glass
of water and rest on Goodwin’s head. This brief ceremony was reinforced
a couple of months later by another ritual, directed by the angel Gabriel,
in which Goodwin was instructed to use the liturgy from the Anglican Book
of Common Prayer to consecrate the sacrament. On several occasions,
Goodwin was anointed by the angels. This always occurred in the early
morning just before he awoke. The “best pure salad oil” sweetened with oil

23. The breastplate was described in the March 10, 1582, entry of Dee’s diary. See Dee, John Dee’s Ac-
tions with Spirits, ed. Whitby, 2:19. The description is not included in the diary excerpts printed by Méric
Casaubon. However, an illustration for a lamin to be constructed for a woman afflicted by witchcraft
was included. Dee, True and Faithful Relation . . . , ed. Casaubon, pt. 1, p. 5.

Heavenly Hosts 145
of rosemary, which he had been instructed to place on the altar ahead of

time, was poured over his nightcap so that it soaked into his head.24
One morning Goodwin awoke to find that his hairline had receded
more than half an inch where the angels had shaved his forehead while he
slept. He maintained that the hair never grew back, but a couple of stray
hairs that the angels had missed constantly regrew even when he plucked
them. The purpose of this procedure was to give him a high forehead “as
anciently the great men had.”25 According to contemporary physiognomy,
a small, narrow forehead was a sign of stupidity, whereas a high forehead
conveyed a “sanguine” personality, which disposed the person to “a good
temperature of mind, endows him or her with wisdom, and large fortune,
and renders the party a happy course of life.”26 Cunning women adver-
tised that they could make “low Foreheads as high as you please, taking
off the hair so that it shall never come again.”27 If Jupiter didn’t grace a
person’s horoscope with wisdom, he could at least make the world think it
had. All of this attention must have gone a long way in building Goodwin’s
self-confidence.
The couple were also sanctified with new spiritual names. On New
Year’s Day 1686, the Lord told Goodwin,
Thy name is Hesekia

and then I thee to honour bring
and Earle, a Duke, a Prince, a king
Then an Emperor thou shalt be . . . 28
Mary’s spiritual name was Lucretia, which reflected her role as a mar-
tyr to Goodwin’s success. According to classical legend, Lucretia was the
extremely chaste wife of Collatinus, a principal member of the army
of Lucius Tarquinius, an Etruscan king. Sextus Tarquinius, the son of
the king, became enamored with Lucretia’s beauty and raped her. After

25. Ibid., 1:187.
26. Anon., True Fortune-Teller, chap. 26, p. 125. For the origins and influence of physiognomy, see Porter,
Windows of the Soul, 63.
27. BL 551.a.32—Collection of 231 Advertisements, fol. 24, “The Gentlewoman who lived in Red-
Lyon-Court, is now removed to Racket-Court near Fleet-bridge, the third Door on the Right-hand.”
The high forehead, which was popular in the Middle Ages, continued to be fashionable during the
reign of Elizabeth I. This could be partly attributable to the whitening agents that women applied to
their faces, which contained lead and caused permanent hair loss, in addition to other health concerns.

146 Chapter 9
Lucretia told her husband and obtained his vow to avenge her honor, she
stabbed herself, as her own honor had been irreparably compromised.29
The name “Lucretia, of whose spirit she was” also reflected the recurring
theme of attempted rape in Mary’s narrative, by both real-world and spir-
itual characters.30
Via the spirit realm, Mary directed Goodwin while she kept him pro-
tected from the outside world. He had already been arrested for two debts
in September of 1684. His father paid bail for one debt of £100. Good-
win managed to negotiate a temporary settlement for a second charge of
£600, which had funded one of his many entrepreneurial projects.31 He
was so harassed by bailiffs that he could only go out at night, with his face
hidden from public view. For his own safety, the spirits frequently ordered
Goodwin to remain indoors. Within this cozy magic circle that Mary had
cast, Goodwin was directed to spend hours praying at the closet altar and
lying on the bed in anticipation of a divine vision. These prolonged states
of ritual forced him to alter his level of consciousness. By living within a
perpetual, albeit passive, state of ritual, he was empowered and reconfig-
ured. The theurgic or spiritual aspect of Mary’s magic transformed Good-
win’s relationship with God and manifested enough power for Goodwin to
take control of his own destiny.32 Eventually, he obtained by non-magical
means the goals of honor and wealth that he had been seeking by super-
natural ones.
Goodwin was encouraged to cultivate the ability to have both visions
and dreams on his own, without the aid of the spirit realm. Throughout
1686, Goodwin was directed by the spirits to be “perfect in vision, & con-
verse with God & Angels” more directly.33 He was frequently ordered to lie
down on his bed in order to facilitate a vision. At first, he was unsuccessful,
29. “Lucretia,” in Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature. The story of Lucretia was popular
throughout the Middle Ages and early modern period, from Augustine’s The City of God to Shake-
speare’s poem, The Rape of Lucrece. Thomas Heywood also wrote a play of the same name.
31. One of Goodwin’s creditors was Sir Richard Barker. Barker was an anti-Catholic physician, who
became the mentor and patron of Israel Tonge and Titus Oates. Tonge and Oates were instrumental
in fabricating the Popish Plot of 1678. Dr. Tonge was one of many elites with an interest in alchemy
and Goodwin knew him well enough to try to secure his spirit as a familiar after his death. It is prob-
able that, through Tonge, Barker had invested in one of Goodwin’s alchemical projects. Alan Mar-
shall, “Tonge, Israel (1621–1680), informer and Church of England clergyman,” and “Oates, Titus
(1649–1705), informer,” DNB; Clark, Goodwin Wharton, 337–38.
32. Kieckhefer, Forbidden Rites, 14–15.

Heavenly Hosts 147
many times falling asleep. Even when he did see something, he needed
Ahab to interpret the information. Only Mary could see and hear Ahab, so
she was still firmly in control. Gradually, Ahab refused to act as a transla-
tor, encouraging Goodwin to be independent in this regard. Long periods
of separation from Mary and Ahab caused Goodwin’s abilities to blos-
som. After his father returned to England in September of 1686, Goodwin
started spending more time at his father’s estate in Wooburn than he did in
London. By March of 1687, when Goodwin was so frequently away from
Mary’s daily counsel, the Lord started to speak as a voice inside Good-
win’s head. The Lord’s instructions became so frequent that every move
Goodwin made was directed by God himself, including how to play at the
gaming table. Unfortunately, Goodwin’s main concern at this time was
impregnating other women, to which end God told him that “he would
be [Goodwin’s] pimp.” Goodwin was assured that he would have at least
five hundred women, including Queen Mary Beatrice of Modena, consort
of King James II. Apparently, the king was willing to step aside and let
Goodwin beget a child with her. Of course, none of these many romantic
fantasies was successful. Goodwin wrote that he was careful not to reveal
any of his desires to Mary, who was “put off with shams.”34 But no doubt
Mary, who could read him so well, was suspicious of his intentions.
After his return from Bath in the spring of 1688, Goodwin started
to hear the Lord’s voice “articulately” from behind the bedroom door as
he formerly had.35 The Lord confirmed that an affair with his landlady
at Bath was one of Satan’s temptations and a sin. This confirmed Good-
win’s doubts about the authenticity of the Lord’s voice in his head: he had
sometimes found it difficult to know whether it was God or Satan that was
directing him. This turn of events was devastating to his spiritual confi-
dence. Although he continued to perceive the Lord’s directives in his head
after this, he did not act on them until they were confirmed by the angels.
34. Ibid., 2:39, 49.

35. Ibid., 2:84.

Chapter 10
Mary’s Crucible
The angels were active in all areas of Mary and Goodwin’s lives, including
their experiments in alchemy. As the forerunner of chemistry, alchemy
was more scientific than it was magical. The “doctrines of Hermes,”1 as
Goodwin called alchemy, originated in Egypt.2 During the Middle Ages,
the art had been kept alive in ancient Greece and the Arab world. Begin-
ning in the twelfth century, alchemical texts were introduced into Europe
by Muslim scholars and translated into Latin by European intellectuals.
A few centuries later, the Renaissance witnessed another resurgence of
interest in the topic. By the seventeenth century, alchemy was considered
a branch of natural philosophy, which was concerned with the wider
investigation into hidden or occult properties of nature. The basic belief
underwriting alchemy was that all matter was reducible to one element.
If the alchemist could reduce minerals to this state of primal chaos, then
new forms could be generated. The most famous claim by alchemists
was that a base metal, such as lead or tin, could be transformed into
silver or gold by means of a substance known as the Philosopher’s Stone.
This mysterious elixir was also credited with the ability to extend human
life, perhaps indefinitely. Alchemy moved into the realm of magic when
the practitioner combined practical experiments with incantations, rit-
uals, secret symbols, and prayers to angelic and/or demonic powers to
enhance the technical processes.

2. For further information on alchemy, see Patai, Jewish Alchemists; Newman and Principe, Alchemy Tried
in the Fire; Young, “Isaac Newton’s Alchemical Notes in the Royal Society”; Nummedal, Alchemy and
Authority in the Holy Roman Empire; Nummedal, “Words and Works in the History of Alchemy.”
148

Mary’s Crucible 149
As a pseudoscience, alchemy was largely empirical and procedural.

Complex processes of distillation, sublimation, and precipitation were
employed to reduce materials to their basic state. Alchemists struggled to
discover the inner virtue of natural things. They believed that metals and
minerals could grow and interact sexually in the same way that plants and
animals did. The methodology (although unknown) had been established
by God at the beginning of the world. We should keep in mind that in
the seventeenth century, scientific theories were in a state of flux. Natu-
ral philosophers employed an eclectic mix of concepts, including medi-
eval Aristotelian scholasticism, Renaissance hermeticism, and Descartes’s
new mechanical philosophy, sometimes in apparent contradiction with
each other. None of these theories ran counter to the prevailing Christian
beliefs in God. To put things into perspective, consider that the physicist
Francis Bacon (1561–1626), one of the forefathers of modern science, was
deeply involved in alchemical experiments.
In addition to turning base metals into precious ones, alchemical
procedures assisted in making medicines for the benefit of mankind. The
preparation of alchemical medicines was associated with cookery and
household science. Brewing, distillation, and the manufacture of clean-
ing products and beauty aids traditionally fell within the domestic sphere.
Throughout the premodern period, aristocratic women had taken respon-
sibility for the health of the people on their country estates by growing
herbs and preparing medicines.3 The distillation room was an important
element of the female world, as indicated by the frontispiece of Hannah
Woolley’s The Accomplished Ladies’ Delight in Preserving, Physick, Beautifying and
Cookery (first published in 1675), which shows a woman working in her
garret with a small still. Many chemicals, such as antimony, were used in
both medicinal concoctions such as purgatives and alchemical procedures.
For a small circle of aristocratic women, such as Robert Boyle’s sister, Lady
Ranelagh, this type of “kitchin-physick” grew into more leisurely scientific
pursuits by the mid-seventeenth century.4
The alchemical laboratory was an extension of a stillroom. Shelves
crammed with jars and flasks of ingredients lined the walls. A hodgepodge
of crucibles, funnels, and mortars and pestles intermingled on the tables,
along with tongs, long- handled forks, and straining ladles. Curiously
3. Hunter, “Women and Domestic Medicine.”

4. Hunter, “Sisters of the Royal Society.”

150 Chapter 10
Figure 14. Stillroom, frontispiece from Hannah Woolley, The Accomplish’d Lady’s Delight in
Preserving, Physick, Beautifying, and Cookery, 4th ed. (London, 1684). Image courtesy of Hough-
ton Library, Harvard University, Hollis number 003910462.

Figure 15. An Alchemical Laboratory, frontispiece from M. M. Pattison Muir, The Story of
Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1913). Originally pub-
lished in Michael Maier’s Tripus Aureus, hoc est, Tres Tractatus Chymici Selectissimi, nempe (Frank-
furt a. M.: Lucas Jennis, 1618). Released by Project Gutenberg, eBook #14218, November
30, 2004.
shaped apparatus such as condensers, matrasses, retorts, and alembics,

designed to condense the vapors and collect the distillate, were commonly
mounted above large iron and clay pots. The open fire of a brazier might
have crackled beside the controlled heat of a brick and mortar furnace.
The rafters in such places were usually thick with soot from the fires that
burned twenty-four hours a day.5
Alchemists have often been considered as marginal members of
society or as charlatans, as depicted by the seventeenth-century playwright
Ben Jonson in his play The Alchemist (1610).6 However, alchemy was the
forerunner of modern chemistry and was practiced by respected members
of society, including royalty. The popularity of the practice in England is
reflected in the vast number of treatises published between 1650 and 1680.
William Cooper’s A Catalogue of Chymicall Books (1675) contains over one
5. Thompson, Lure and Romance of Alchemy, 108–19; Dickson, Thomas and Rebecca Vaughan’s Aqua Vitae, 50;
Newman and Principe, Alchemy Tried in the Fire, 98–99; Moran, Distilling Knowledge, 62.
6. Jonson, The Alchemist.

152 Chapter 10
hundred pages of titles written in or translated into English.7 Information

was readily available to the curious literati. The hundreds of people, such
as Mary and Goodwin, who dabbled in alchemy were more aptly con-
sidered entrepreneurial or artisanal alchemists than natural philosophers.
Their interests were more practical than theoretical.
Both Mary and Goodwin had previous experience in the art of
alchemy. Prior to meeting Mary, Goodwin had conducted several exper-
iments. Unfortunately, his efforts had ended in either a falling out with
his partners or a falling down of the furnaces. His worst experience was
under the direction of a seemingly well-bred and charismatic alchemist
newly arrived from living abroad in Paris. Goodwin and some of his clos-
est friends invested in setting up five lamps or burners. Goodwin personally
tended them for nine or ten months. Just before the experiment should
have reached its conclusion, the alleged alchemist “accidentally” set fire to
the cupboard where the lamps were hung. Between the dry wood of the
cupboard and the lamp oil, the fire was soon out of control. The house
almost burned to the ground. Not only did Goodwin lose his investment of
several hundred pounds, as well as some valuable legal papers concerning
the Wooburn estate, but the alchemist ran off, leaving Goodwin to answer
for other funds that he had helped the man obtain.
Mary’s alchemical experiments had begun while she was married to
her second husband, Mr. Lawrence. She continued her experiments after
the loss of her household in the Great Fire of 1666 and after the death of
Lawrence. His long absences at sea had afforded her the freedom to set up
a laboratory under the pretense of establishing a place fit for her practice
of physic. Due to its secretive nature, alchemy was commonly practiced in
private, sequestered spaces. In Mary’s case, she had a small workshop in her
garret. There she explored the several instructions outlined in her precious
grimoire for turning mercury into gold and copper into silver. According to
a modern scientific understanding, metals can’t actually transform at the
molecular level, but early modern alchemists would have been impressed
when tin or pewter was made to resemble silver if it was “often melted
and extinguished in a lixivium of fixt nitre,” a process involving wood ash
and saltpeter.8 And a good return on investment must have been made by
combining four ounces of pure silver with twenty-nine ounces of “regulus”
7. Cooper, Catalogue of Chymicall Books.

8. Anon., Works of the Highly Experienced and Famous Chymist, John Rudolph Glauber, 180.

of antimony to produce artificial silver.9 By the time that Mary was digging
for treasure at Islington (circa late 1668 or early 1669), she had furnished
her household with many items of imitation silver, even the andirons and
tongs for her fireplace. The abundance of silver in her house led to the
rumor that she had knowledge of the Philosopher’s Stone, meaning, in this
case, the secret elixir that would transmute metals. Word of this reached
Prince Rupert, who had suffered the loss of his servant Garroll during the
treasure-hunting expedition at Islington. Although the prince was most
famous as a cavalry leader and naval commander, he also had an ongoing
interest in alchemy. He personally directed metallurgical experiments in
his laboratory in the Round Tower of Windsor Castle, of which he was the
governor. The “prince’s metal,” an alloy of copper and zinc used in the
making of small metal products, gained him an international reputation as
a metallurgist. However, his reputation as an irascible, impatient man was
equally well known.10
On the premise that he was angry about the death of his servant
Garroll, Prince Rupert summoned Mary to his house in Spring Gardens.
He accused her of dealing with the devil and being responsible for killing
the man. She protested that it was not her fault if the spirits had more
mind to speak to her than others. She protested that she had never dealt
with the devil. But the prince revealed his true interest when he abruptly
changed the subject and told her that he was aware that her whole house
was seemingly furnished with silver. He requested that she go to his lab-
oratory and demonstrate her method. But Mary knew her legal rights.
She informed him that, according to patent statutes, a person was entitled
to make use of an invention for fourteen years without making it public.
When the prince couldn’t attain what he wanted by favor, he resorted to
force. He sent some of his men to her house to destroy her furnaces and
take away her silver utensils. As a single woman without the protection of
a man, Mary was afraid to take any legal action against a person of his
status, or to continue her work.
Providence intervened a few days later when Mr. Parish proposed.
But the marriage with Parish did not turn out to be very successful, and
9. Antimony is a chemical that is silvery white in its elemental form; Newman and Principe, Alchemy
Tried in the Fire, 51, 130.
10. Thomson, Warrior Prince, 215; Kitson, Prince Rupert, 149, 299; Ian Roy, “Rupert, prince and count
palatine of the Rhine and duke of Cumberland,” DNB.

154 Chapter 10
Mary once again found it necessary to establish herself as an independent

woman. After the birth of her son by Parish, she continued to practice
physic. She set up another alchemical curiosity that had almost come to
fruition after three and a half years of tending the lamps. Around this
time, Mary was approached by a woman she identified as Lady Floyd,11
who requested that Mary attend Dr. Thomas Williams at Whitehall, who
was not well. After escorting Mary into Williams’s chambers, Lady Floyd
withdrew, leaving her alone with the man, who was dressed in his night-
gown. As if this weren’t disconcerting enough, he locked the door behind
her, assuring Mary that he only wished to talk in private. As he proceeded
to ask her a hundred questions about natural philosophy, she realized that
he was more interested in her knowledge in alchemy than in her skill in
physic. She made him short answers and got away as quickly as she could,
giving him a false address.
Thomas Williams was Charles II’s “chemical physician.” He had
recently been appointed to the position, possibly because of his previous
experience as an assayer.12 King Charles displayed a keen personal interest
in all things scientific and was one of the founding members of the Royal
Society, the English flagship of the scientific revolution. When Charles
returned from exile in 1661, he brought with him a well-known alchemist
whose commission was to reproduce the legendary cordial distilled by Sir
Walter Raleigh at the beginning of the seventeenth century, while Raleigh
was imprisoned in the Tower.13 In 1672, Charles built a new laboratory
11. Lady Floyd, or Lloyd, may refer to the wife of Sir Godfrey Lloyd (c. 1608–1671), also known as
Captain Lloyd, a military engineer and strong supporter of Charles II before the Restoration. His
wife, Catherine Smith, was the widow of Thomas Claypole; Andrew Saunders, “Sir Godfrey Lloyd (b.
after 1608, d. 1671?),” DNB; Shaw, Knights of England, 2:225. A less likely possibility is Elizabeth Lloyd,
daughter of an apothecary, John Jones, who married the judge Sir Richard Lloyd (1634–1686); J. M.
Rigg and S. J. Skedd, “Lloyd, Sir Nathaniel (1669–1741),” DNB.
12. In Goodwin’s opinion, Williams was a very low gentleman with an ill education. He only received
the degree of M.D. by special request of the king to the vice chancellor of Cambridge University on
March 5, 1669. Nevertheless, Williams was created baron on November 17, 1674. Cokayne, Complete
Baronetage, vol. 4, 1665–1707, 66; Shaw, Calendar of Treasury Books, vol. 3, 1669–1672, 69; Holmes, Sickly
Stuarts, 99. According to Bucholz, Williams held the position of chemical physician from 1667 to 1693
at an annual salary of twenty pounds per annum; Bucholz, Office-Holders in Modern Britain, vol. 11 (rev.),
Court Officers, 1660–1837, 173. But according to Shaw, Williams was not appointed “chimicall phisi-
tian” until May 14, 1669; Shaw, Calendar of Treasury Books, vol. 3, 1669–1672, 69. Williams had been
appointed assay master for all coinages of tin in Devon and Cornwall in November 1668; Calendar of
State Papers, Domestic, Charles II, [vol. 9], Oct. 1668–Dec. 1669, 70, 73. The processes used to determine
the validity and purity of precious metals were the same procedures used in alchemical operations:
dissolution, sublimation, and cementation; Newman and Principe, Alchemy Tried in the Fire, 39–44.
13. Mendelsohn, “Alchemy and Politics in England 1649–1665,” 30.

at Whitehall, situated on the ground floor just below the Privy Gallery.
The king could easily access the laboratory from his bedchamber via the
back stairs, allowing him to oversee chemical experiments for the purpose
of producing medicinal cures. His curiosity may have even compromised
his health by exposing him to mercury vapor, a highly toxic but odorless
by-product of the process of extracting mercury from cinnabar ore.14
Side effects include seizures, tremors, headaches, fatigue, irritability, and
depression.15 Mary displayed some of the same symptoms.
Eventually, Williams managed to track Mary down at her house in
Ludgate Street. She probably would have resisted his persistent efforts if
it had not been for another gentleman who was pursuing her romantically
at the time. In an effort to win her affections, her unwanted suitor had
secretly slipped her a love potion. When the first dose of the powder did
not have any effect, he gave her a second. The combination resulted in
“a violent fever, gave her great pains all over her, [and] almost took away
her limbs & senses.”16 For the next three or four months, she suffered from
a continual drowsiness, during which time Williams ingratiated himself
by calling on her once or twice a day, bringing her presents and provid-
ing medicines. She couldn’t help but be grateful for his kindness and was
therefore civil to him. But her unfortunate circumstances allowed him the
opportunity to become very familiar with all her business, which led to the
destruction of her three-year alchemical experiment. One day, while she
was replacing a wick in one of the lamps, he interrupted her. He insisted
that she accompany him on some urgent matter. In her hurry, she left the
wick a little too long, which resulted in the fire being too hot. When she
came home, she found the vessels broken and three and a half years of
work destroyed.
Williams was inadvertently to blame for another alchemical loss as
well. Mary had an old acquaintance by the name of Mr. Abab (not to
be confused with the angel Ahab). He was a very rich Jewish man who
possessed an alchemical treatise written in Hebrew. Mr. Abab knew a way
of fixing mercury into gold in less than one hour, using a white powder
that speeded the process. Christian alchemists sometimes employed Jewish
14. Dugdale, Whitehall through the Centuries, 78–80; Hearsay, Bridge, Church and Palace in Old London, 23;
Tinniswood, By Permission of Heaven, 33.
15. Holmes, Sickly Stuarts, 98–106.

156 Chapter 10
masters because it was thought they were more closely linked to ancient
traditions. The connection between Jews and alchemy was part of the leg-
end constructed around Nicholas Flamel, a fourteenth-century Parisian
alchemist whose story was published in 1612. Flamel had allegedly stum-
bled across a copy of the original Book of Abraham the Mage, which he inter-
preted with the help of a Jewish converso from León “who was very skilful
in sublime Sciences.”17
How Mary became so influenced by Jewish traditions (Mosaic Low-
lander customs, Ahab the angel, and Abab the alchemist) and when that
influence began will remain a mystery. The Jewish community in England
had been unofficially tolerated and supported during the Interregnum of
Oliver Cromwell for economic reasons. A synagogue was established in
a house in Creechurch Lane, in the east of London. When Charles II
resumed the monarchy, he granted a charter of liberties to the Jewish com-
munity and officially naturalized many of them. The dowry of the king’s
wife, Catherine of Braganza, was managed by Portuguese Jewish bankers
from Amsterdam.18 While Christians and Jews did not usually mix socially,
they did have other occasions to interact. In Mary’s case, she and Mr.
Abab shared a common interest in alchemy and he promised to teach his
method to Mary. While they were conferring over the procedure, Dr. Wil-
liams burst into the room, breaking the door open with his foot. Although
they quickly covered their work and pretended to be about some other sort
of experiment, Mr. Abab would not agree to meet with her again. Eventu-
ally, he went into France, where he died. And so the hope of learning this
method was lost on account of Williams’s continual plaguing of her.
Then Williams took another approach. He invited Mary to live at
Whitehall as governess of his household. His wife, Grace Carwardine,
preferred to reside at his Welsh estate.19 The doctor hinted that when his
sickly wife and Mary’s elderly husband died, he would marry her. In the
meantime, he promised to settle an estate on her for the remainder of her
life. Mary eventually succumbed to his promises. She arranged to have all
17. Flamel, His Exposition of the Hieroglyphicall Figures . . . , 23. See also Patai, Jewish Alchemists, 11,
218–23; Harkness, Review of Nicolas Flamel, His Exposition of the Hieroglyphicall Figures (1624), ed. Lau-
rinda Dixon.
18. Hyamson, History of the Jews in England, 138–39, 164, 172–74; Roth, “Charles II and the Jews”;
Sombart, Jews and Modern Capitalism, 55.
19. Williams married his second wife, Grace Carwardine of Madley, Hereford, on December 21, 1666;
Cokayne, Complete Baronetage, vol. 4, 1665–1707, 66.

her household goods delivered to his apartments at Whitehall. But before

she even moved in, she got a taste of his true intentions. One day when
she went to oversee the arrangement of her things, she noticed that all of
the pewter on display was stamped with his coat of arms. When she asked
him where her pewter goods were, he replied that those were hers, newly
melted down and remade. When she demanded to know the reason for
this, he replied “what is yours is mine & mine yours.”20
Apparently, this concept of ownership extended beyond the pew-
ter. A few days after Mary moved in, she was awakened in the night by
someone slipping naked into her bed. Grabbing her dressing gown, she
ran for the door to call for the servants, but the intruder blocked her
path. She continued to make such a ruckus by yelling and stamping her
feet that a maid soon appeared with a candle, which revealed that the
interloper was Williams. By this time, Mary was like a madwoman, rant-
ing and raving against the doctor. She was as angry at being restricted as
she had been startled at being accosted. She wanted to leave the house
then and there, but Williams did all he could to pacify her. When she
woke in the morning, her first instinct was to break off her relationship
with Williams immediately. But she realized that she would risk losing
all her belongings. So she designed to make the best of the situation and
get away as soon as she could. The nighttime incident cultivated such
an aversion to him that she resisted showing him her alchemical secrets,
although she made all the utensils in his house appear silver, as she had
in her own household. She also made medicinal waters and spirits, for
which she gained the favor of King Charles, whom she would approach
later on Goodwin’s behalf.
For several years, Williams left all the details of his household to
Mary. She often purchased things out of her own pocket. When she pre-
sented him with the bills, he would occasionally give her some money,
but, all in all, he was more indebted to her than she to him. When she
threatened to leave, he counter-threatened to prohibit the removal of her
personal belongings. In the end, she resolved to leave regardless of her
losses. George advised her to take money from Dr. Williams’s money chest,
for which she held the keys, but Mary’s honor prevented her. And so she
forsook Whitehall with only some small cabinets.

158 Chapter 10
While she was resident at Whitehall, Mary’s alchemical expertise

was also desired by George Villiers. The second Duke of Buckingham
(and sometime gentleman of the bedchamber to Charles II), Villiers had
a keen interest in scientific inquiry. Like his boyhood companion the king,
he was a fellow of the Royal Society. He maintained a laboratory in his
summer residence of Wallingford House. He had even set up a make-
shift laboratory in the Tower of London when he was sent there in 1677
for contempt.21 The duke had requested Mary to witness a demonstration
concerning the secret to the Philosopher’s Stone carried out by a hand-
some, middle-aged woman from France. While Mary and Buckingham
were at one end of the laboratory, the woman added a mysterious white
powder to the alchemical concoction. By the time the mixture cooled, the
lead had magically changed into gold. Encouraged by the results, Buck-
ingham ordered huge quantities of lead and a great number of melting
pots from Wales. But while melting a hundredweight of lead to be trans-
muted, the crucible cracked, and the lead ran across the floor in a great
sheet. Before a second attempt could be planned, the duke received a letter
telling him that the Frenchwoman would not come again. When Goodwin
heard the story, he attributed Buckingham’s misfortune to his well-known
debauchery and wicked ways. Because alchemy relied on divine revelation,
success was often linked to moral stature.22
In the fall of 1683, the couple combined their alchemical knowl-
edge, with the help of a third financial partner. Mary had never been able
to retrieve her childhood grimoire, but she obtained a couple of small pam-
phlets on mercurial work. Mary even tracked down Mr. Abab’s English
mistress, with whom he had left his grimoire written in Hebrew. But before
Mary could retrieve the recipe that the Jewish alchemist had written in
his broken English, the woman went into hiding from an abusive Irish-
man with whom she had been having an affair. (Superfluous details such
as these often provide information on contemporary issues of gender
21. The duke developed a method of converting flint glass into a high quality glass, which was pro-
duced at a workshop in Vauxhall. Coincidentally, one of Buckingham’s clientele was Sir Thomas
Osborne, the Earl of Danby, with whom Mary claimed she traveled to St. Malo during the civil war.
Another acquaintance of Mary’s, Robert Clayton, was administering Buckingham’s estates and grant-
ing the duke an annual allowance of £5,000. During the time Mary was at Whitehall, the duke was
back and forth between the mansion he was building at Clivedon and his residence in London. Bruce
Yardley, “George Villiers, second duke of Buckingham (1628–1687),” DNB; Hanrahan, Charles II and
the Duke of Buckingham, 160–67, 75.
22. Patai, Jewish Alchemists, 6.

and patriarchy.) Mary’s familiar spirit George arranged for the spirit of
Mr. Abab to come from France and instruct them. But he was constantly
delayed by Jewish holy days and other hindrances imposed by the masters
of the synagogue (which raises some interesting questions about the status
of Jews in a presumably Christian heaven).
The Lowlanders were also happy to assist the couple. Father Fryar
provided a particular slate stone and sent a couple of slaves to deliver a
hogshead of special vinegar. Unfortunately, the slaves pawned the keg of
vinegar for one of brandy at an inn close to the Acton Road. Penelope,
who was queen of the Lowlanders by then, agreed to send her head chem-
ist, a Spaniard who spoke very little English, but instead of keeping his
appointments, the man also attended the local taverns where he proceeded
to drink brandy at an alarming rate. This debauched behavior resulted in a
high fever and caused all of his skin to peel away, which resulted in a quick
death. (It is interesting that Mary wasn’t the only one with a weakness for
brandy.)
The expense of establishing an alchemical laboratory could be
considerable. Entrepreneurs like Mary and Goodwin frequently had to
compromise secrecy to secure funding from a wealthy patron or investor.23
Goodwin’s list of potential investors was slim, as he had borrowed heavily
from many men in the past with disastrous results. He suggested that they
approach John Wildman, better known as “Major” Wildman, who had
been involved in Goodwin’s previous alchemical project. Wildman had
made a sizeable fortune as an agent in the land market during the Inter-
regnum. The major also had a strong relationship with the Duke of Buck-
ingham, for whom he had acted as solicitor and trustee of the duke’s estate.
Since his financial dealings with the duke were around the same time as
Mary was allegedly consulting with Buckingham on his alchemical project,
Mary may have been familiar with the major before she knew Goodwin.
In any case, neither Mary nor Goodwin was concerned that Wildman
had recently been released from the Tower of London for his suspected
involvement in the Rye House plot of April 1683.24 Wildman agreed to
be their partner in fixing mercury into gold. By August 1684, the trio had
23. Nummedal, Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire, 142.
24. There was insufficient evidence to convict Wildman as a conspirator in the Rye House affair,
and he was officially acquitted in February 1684. He was reputedly a man of high temperament and
changeable loyalties. Richard Greaves, “Sir John Wildman (1622/3–1698),” DNB; Ashley, John Wild-
man, Plotter and Postmaster, 8, 48, 239.

160 Chapter 10
managed to make one imperfect ingot of metal that “stood the water on
the stone” but “would not perfectly stand the water in the lumps.”25 Per-
haps a modern-day alchemist could decipher these enigmatic statements.
To add to the constant disappointments, Wildman was impatient
with the proceedings and found fault with everything. Wildman’s biog-
rapher suggests that the alchemical project, as well as his involvement
with Mary and Goodwin’s treasure-seeking expeditions, were attempts to
raise funds in anticipation of James II’s ascension to the throne. Wildman
was purportedly involved in a plan to install Charles’s eldest illegitimate
son, the Duke of Monmouth, as king in James’s place. By June of 1684,
Wildman, anticipating that he might have to go into exile at any moment,
was pushing for closure in all their projects.26 By February 1685, following
Charles II’s death, Wildman became extremely demanding. He started to
seriously doubt the cause of their constant disappointments, hinting that
they could not proceed from God. In any event, he kept his purse close;
any funds “came hard like iron,” so that Mary and Goodwin continued to
be in debt, the same as before.27
Wildman’s ability to play both sides of the political divide was exhib-
ited in his relations with Mary and Goodwin as well. When he was with
Goodwin, he assured him that he trusted no one but him and did not
believe everything that Mary said. But according to Mary, Wildman cau-
tioned her that as soon as Goodwin had concluded his business with the
queen of the Lowlanders and come into his realm, Goodwin would let
both her and Wildman “sink like a stone to the bottom.”28 Mary also told
Goodwin that Wildman tried to convince her to go with him to the Con-
tinent where they could do alchemical work together. He promised her
that she should never want, and he would settle £200 a year on her. He
also attempted to have sexual relations with her, but Mary remained loyal
to her spiritual husband. Given Wildman’s fickle and avaricious nature,
combined with his obvious belief in the spirit realm, his proposition might
be true. However, Mary could have fabricated this narrative to discourage
Goodwin from continuing his relationship with Wildman once it was clear

26. A warrant for Wildman’s arrest was issued in May 1685, but he escaped to Holland in June where
Goodwin saw him when he traveled to the Continent to join Philip Wharton. Richard Greaves, “Sir
John Wildman (1622/3–1698),” DNB.
28. Ibid., 1:242.

that financial investment was not forthcoming. Mary was always careful to
ensure that she was the main influence in Goodwin’s life.
Transforming mercury into gold wasn’t the only chemical pursuit
of the new partnership. Mary also had a recipe to make malleable glass,
which she claimed she had successfully executed in the past. This great
curiosity required goat’s blood. Beliefs such as this were beginning to be
questioned by the “new science.” In Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1658), the phy-
sician Sir Thomas Browne included the belief that glass could be made
malleable in his list of superstitions. The inclusion of goat’s blood in the
process was probably based on the theory that it could make diamonds
soft.29 To this end, Goodwin had purchased a goat, which was stabled with
Wildman’s horse. It was Wildman’s responsibility to bleed the goat at the
appropriate astrological moment, which he apparently managed to per-
form on at least one occasion. But before he could repeat the procedure,
the goat was either lost or stolen. Wildman refused to hand over the blood
he had already procured (if, indeed, he had).
But the most fascinating alchemical project of Mary and Goodwin
concerned the making of a homunculus. Mary described how an artist
who had lived with the Duke of Buckingham produced a living creature
from frog spawn. Even more amazing was the engendering of a creature
with divine understanding from a man’s sperm. Paracelsus gave instruc-
tions concerning this wonder in De Rerum Natura.
In order to accomplish it, you must proceed thus. Let the

semen of a man putrefy by itself in a sealed cucurbite with the
highest putrefaction of the venter equinus [womb or embryo of
a horse] for forty days, or until it begins at last to live, move,
and be agitated, which can easily be seen. After this time it
will be in some degree like a human being, but, nevertheless,
transparent and without body. If now, after this, it be every day
nourished and fed cautiously and prudently with the arcanum
of human blood, and kept for forty weeks in the perpetual
and eternal heat of a venter equinus, it becomes, thenceforth a
true and living infant, having all the members of a child that is
born from a woman, but much smaller.30
29. Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, bk. 2, chap. 5, pp. 64–66.

30. Paracelsus, Hermetic and Alchemical Writings, ed. Waite, 1:120–25.

162 Chapter 10
Mary knew a man who had produced such a creature, and he had
promised to bequeath the homunculus to her when he died. When Mary
tracked the man down, she discovered that he had recently died and left
the creature in the care of a midwife, who thought it was a normal baby.
But out of neglect, the female creature lay dying. Mary sent George to
request that the creature come to Goodwin in spirit after it died, in the
same way that George served Mary. The couple assured it that they would
embalm its corpse and lay it to rest among the tombs of the Lowlander
kings. Father Fryar was sent to fetch the little body, which lay in a box not
eight inches long. Unfortunately, Goodwin never got a chance to see it, as
the carcass was already beginning to decompose. On several occasions, the
spirit of the creature attempted to speak to Goodwin when they were in
Hounslow, close to its burial grounds, but it did not have enough strength.
Mary and Goodwin’s alchemical works came to a halt after Wild-
man fled to Holland for his alleged role in the Monmouth Rebellion. After
1685, references to alchemy in Goodwin’s journals were limited to Mary
attempting to get the Philosopher’s Stone from the spirits at Ratcliff. In the
cellar where she had been tormented by snakes and toads, she was shown
a great many chemists at work in a laboratory. The chief alchemist was a
woman who promised to make Mary the greatest philosopher ever. The
woman was a young, pretty Lowlander rather than a spirit; she pretended
to be very kind to Mary but actually had designs on marrying Goodwin
(doesn’t everyone?). She was eager to meet Goodwin, but the meetings
were inevitably delayed, at which times the woman would fall into a pas-
sion like a madwoman. It turned out that she had surreptitiously ravished
Goodwin in his sleep several times in the same manner as had the queen,
the princess, the duchess, and Father Fryar’s daughter.
In place of alchemy, the couple shifted their attention to deep-
sea diving. Before Goodwin met Mary, he had invested several hundred
pounds in a salvaging operation to recover guns, anchors, brass artillery,
armor, and such from sunken galleons. He had also obtained letters patent
from King Charles II for an improved diving engine.31 His biggest venture
had been an expedition to retrieve salvage from the legendary Tobermory
galleon, which had sunk due to an internal explosion while harboring from
31. Goodwin’s partners in the patent were William Perkins and James Innes. See McKee, From Merciless
Invaders, 270–72; Clark, Goodwin Wharton, 6; Clark, Whig’s Progress, 72.

Figure 16. Halley’s Diving Bell, from William Hooper, Rational Recreations . . . (London,
1774). Wellcome Images.
bad weather at the Isle of Mull, in the Hebrides.32 In 1607, divers had
scavenged the upper deck and managed to expose the lower level, but the
ship was lodged ten fathoms (sixty feet) deep in a bed of mud, which inhib-
ited operations. In the end, Goodwin’s plans were fouled because the legal
owner of the wreck, Archibald Campbell, the ninth Earl of Argyll, had
fled the country following charges of treason, and Goodwin, once again,
could not raise the necessary funds.
Goodwin was not the only Englishman who was obsessed with the
idea to “go a-wrecking.” After the destruction of the Spanish Armada,
32. Contrary to popular belief, the ship sunk at Tobermory was not one of the Spanish Armada galle-
ons but was a cargo ship originating from Ragusa (Dubrovnik) in the Adriatic Sea. It was loaded with
soldiers, food, drink, and weapons but no treasure. Earle, Treasure Hunt, 26–27.

164 Chapter 10
Queen Elizabeth had appointed commissioners to recover whatever wreck-

age they could from the Spanish fleet. But before officials could get to the
wrecks, the local people had picked clean the bones of any vessel that lay
in shallow water or on dry land. As technology improved in the seven-
teenth century, salvaging Spanish wrecks continued to attract interest. The
diving bell was the most promising invention. The most common design,
patented in 1632, was simply an open-ended wine cask, heavily weighted
at the open end. The barrel was inverted and lowered into the water, trap-
ping air inside for the divers to refill their lungs. This was improved upon
by the astronomer Edmund Halley (of Halley’s comet fame) in 1691, who
patented some improvements to the diving bell and diving suit so that a
diver could work outside the bell.33 Of course, visibility was often a prob-
lem and there was no way to refresh the trapped air, so the divers had to
surface frequently, which slowed operations drastically. Some of the slave
divers from Madeira could dive naked, but in the waters off the south
shore of England, divers usually wore a heavy garment of waxed canvas
lined with fur to combat the extreme cold, which further impeded their
speed and mobility.34
In December 1687, using funds raised from Lady Ivy and Sir Thomas
Travell,35 Goodwin engaged in deep-sea diving again. Mary, close to her
time of delivering two daughters, remained in London, but Goodwin had
the help of the spirit world. The angels promised to supply a special face-
or headpiece fitted with a unique material as thin as cambric. The head-
piece would filter the air out of the water so the diver could breathe and
keep the water out. Inevitably, there were delays in delivering the mecha-
nism. When Goodwin secretly used the device at a site near Southampton
in July 1688, he was surprised to find that the water ran through it. The
angels told Mary that this was because the fabric had been stretched too
much. Instead, Goodwin patiently waited for the next full moon when the
tide was out, hoping to find treasure in the shallow rocky water. But the
ship he had hired was in poor condition, and the crew mutinied.
In June and July of 1691, Goodwin engaged in an expedition to the
Isle of Man, in the Irish Sea between Ireland and England. In addition
33. Alan Cook, “Halley, Edmond (1656–1742),” DNB.

34. McKee, From Merciless Invaders, 272; Martin, Full Fathom Five, 57; Earle, Treasure Hunt, xi–xiii, 23,
101, 109–11.
35. Sir Thomas was the son of a wealthy London merchant. He was knighted in 1684 and had good
connections to the court. Clark, Goodwin Wharton, 205.

to stormy weather, Goodwin’s small fleet of ships had to fight off the
French with the help of Archibald Campbell, ninth Earl of Argyll, and
his men-of-war frigates.36 Lord Argyll was also trying to recover lost trea-
sure from the Spanish Armada. When the crew finally had a chance “to try
[his] long wier [wire?] pipes (made with so much care,” they found them
all leaky. Presumably, these were the tubes for the circulation of air to the
diver. After mending the pipes and weathering another storm, Goodwin
resolved to try the equipment himself, “notwithstanding the cold.” But
he discovered that some of the equipment was “maliciously bored with
holes.” The problems concerning the circulation of the air could not be
remedied out at sea, but had to wait until he returned to London. At one
point, the Lord instructed Goodwin to “heat the air,” which he did “by
burning brandy in the box [that] the bellows & head of the pipes were in.”
In addition to technical problems, Goodwin quarreled with his partner,
Sir Thomas, who “grew now by degrees so peevish & humorsome.” The
expedition resulted in the retrieval of a dozen guns and some cables, which
he presented to King William and Queen Mary. The angels brought a new
mouthpiece in January 1692, with instructions that it shouldn’t be opened
until he was at sea. While Goodwin was diving off the coast of Scotland in
July of 1693, all he found in the package were four sheets of white paper
wrapped in a thin gauze. Mary informed him that the angels’ invention
had been transformed by the devil.37
***
The concept of providence contributed to Goodwin’s acceptance of this

situation. When plans did not work out, Goodwin declared that “nobody
can blame or wonder at my concern in so great a point . . . but the inscru-
table wisdom & providence of the Lord must be submitted to.”38 Prov-
idence, or the belief in divine intervention, had long been an aspect of
Roman Catholic belief. Following the Reformation, the theory became
36. The French were harassing the English in the Irish Sea because after James II fled England, he
recruited the support of the French monarch, King Louis XIV. This skirmish was part of the Nine
Years’ War on the Continent.
38. Ibid., 2:174.

166 Chapter 10
the cornerstone of Protestant theology.39 God was constructed as a pilot

rather than a watchmaker, directing every inconsequential detail of a per-
son’s life. Nothing happened by chance but only by God’s purpose. God
was capable of intervening in unpredictable ways, as well as suspending
the natural order of the universe. The outcome of experiences with the
spirit world was not bad luck but God’s design, which had a higher pur-
pose hidden to mere mortals. Therefore stoic patience and serene accep-
tance of one’s fate in the face of adversity was a display of faith in God.
Goodwin’s upbringing in the nonconformist Wharton household would
have reinforced the strength of this conviction and the acceptance of fate.
As Goodwin put it, “it is not wisdom, strength, nor vigilance but God that
gives the success; who still wisely hindered all our endeavours against ten
thousand probabilities by seeming accidents unimaginable.”40
39. Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England, 8–20.


Chapter 11
Plots and Piety

In addition to directing treasure hunting, alchemical experiments, and
deep-sea diving, the angelic spirits also influenced Mary and Goodwin’s
religious and political lives. Mary and the angels encouraged Goodwin to
make peace with his father, which contributed to restoring his status in the
world of politics and the royal court. While the spirits were advising Good-
win on how to reestablish himself in English politics, events in the world of
the Lowlanders mirrored or reversed the religious and political situation in
the realm of the Uplanders, drawing on specific historical events.
In seventeenth- century England, religion was inextricably inter-
twined with politics. However, the angels that advised Mary took an ecu-
menical approach, telling Mary that “all religions were the same.”1 Even
Jews could join the realm of angels in Mary’s configuration of heaven. But
on at least one occasion, the angels supported Protestantism over Cathol-
icism, a choice that was loaded with political overtones. In May 1684, the
angel Gabriel directed Mary to renounce her Catholic practice. This came
on the heels of a grueling three-day penance imposed on Mary by her
confessor at the chapel in Wild Street. Mary had been avoiding going to
confession because she did not want to admit to her out-of-wedlock preg-
nancy. The priest threatened to excommunicate her and imposed the pen-
ance. After the second day of her penance, Gabriel appeared in the glass
of water she used for scrying. The archangel told her to tell the priest that
she renounced the Catholic faith. She obediently went to speak with her
1. The angels made this pronouncement on several occasions; Autobiography of Goodwin Wharton,
1:127, 138, 180.
167

168 Chapter 11
confessor; he tried to convince her of the folly of this decision, but she
was determined. The priest had little choice but to lead her to the church
door and tell the porter that she was considered a heretic and no longer
allowed to enter. A couple of days later, she was still doubtful of her deci-
sion, and out of habit, began to enter the chapel, when “one as a man”
stopped her.2 The angel told her that all Christian religions were good but
that Protestantism was better for her. He directed her to start going to the
Anglican church of St. Paul’s in Covent Garden. Mary never returned to
the Church of Rome.
With this change, Mary’s religion came into line with Goodwin’s
politics, but the realm of the Lowlanders remained Catholic. The Catholic
Lowlanders had concerns that were similar to the Protestant Uplanders.
Just as the majority of Uplanders did not want a Catholic monarch, the
Catholic Lowlanders did not welcome the thought of a Protestant and
alien king in the person of Goodwin. In September of 1684, some of
the Lowlanders attempted to prohibit Goodwin’s entrance into the realm.
They feared that he would “destroy their customs, their religion, [and] their
laws.”3 The Lowlander Duke of Hungary, a foreigner who had designs to
usurp the queen’s realm, had laid barrels of gunpowder under each of
the four gates to the palace, with the design to kill either the queen as she
left or Goodwin as he entered. Being forewarned by Mary and Good-
win (who had been informed by George), the queen’s forces were able to
arrest the duke and his co-conspirators in treason. They dug beneath the
gates and surprised the men in the underground vaults. But the man at the
main gate, which led to the entrance to the Uplands, was alerted of their
approach and detonated the gunpowder. Several Lowlanders were killed
and the entrance to the fairy realm was blocked. The vast quantities of
earth and rubble were not removed until the end of October 1684.
At first glance, the scenario echoes aspects of the Gunpowder Plot of
1605. On that occasion, a group of Catholic gentry had attempted to blow
up the House of Lords on the first day of Parliament. In addition to assassi-
nating King James I, they would have killed most of the royal family along
with the aristocracy and Anglican bishops who normally sat in the House.
The explosives expert, Guy Fawkes, was executed along with the other con-
2. Ibid., 1:126–27.
3. Ibid., 1:156.

Plots and Piety 169
spirators.4 Mary would have been well aware of this moment in English
history, as the failure of the plot was officially celebrated every year. In Jan-
uary 1606, Parliament passed an act that mandated a commemoration,
with prayers, sermons, and bell ringing in every church in the country.5 The
commemoration quickly took on populist elements with bonfires and fire-
works, and eventually became a major aspect of Whig (pro-parliamentarian
politicians) propaganda. Guy Fawkes is burned in effigy to the present day.6
The element of gunpowder would have been close to Mary’s consciousness
on account of an explosion at a powder mill just east of Hounslow at the
end of June 1684. There were a couple of powder mills in the area. A
sword mill in the parish of East Bedfont, northwest of Baber Bridge, had
been converted to the production of gunpowder during the Interregnum.
Another powder mill was built below the bridge. The explosion reported by
Goodwin was probably from a powder mill in Isleworth parish.7 Goodwin
reported that the blast “shaked our very room as we sat.”8
But Mary did not have to look that far back in history for plots
against the monarchy. In 1678, Jesuit priests in England had been accused
by a radically anti-Catholic clergyman, Israel Tonge, of conspiring to
assassinate Charles II and place his brother James on the throne.9 The so-
called Popish Plot was later discovered to be a fiction largely constructed
by Titus Oates, a man of questionable character with Jesuit associations
who had co-authored the anti-Catholic pamphlets with Tonge. The fact
that the plot was taken seriously illustrates the rampant anti-Catholic sen-
timents in England at the time. The plot raised concerns about a possible
Catholic takeover from both within the country and from Catholic powers
abroad, similar to the situation with Goodwin and the Lowlanders. The
public hysteria surrounding the fictitious conspiracy culminated in a Whig
campaign to exclude the Duke of York, the future King James II, from the
throne. The Exclusion Bill, proposed by the Whigs in three different par-
liaments between 1679 and 1681, was deferred because Charles dissolved
the Parliament each time.10
4. Sharpe, Remember, Remember.

5. Jac. I. c.1, An Act for a Public Thanksgiving, in Statutes of the Realm, vol. 4, pt. 1, [1586–1624],
1067–68.
6. Cressy, Bonfires and Bells.
7. History of the County of Middlesex, ed. Reynolds, 3:112–14.
9. Kenyon, Popish Plot.
10. Horwitz, “Protestant Reconciliation in the Exclusion Crisis.”

170 Chapter 11
The Popish Plot was followed a few years later by the Rye House
Plot. In June of 1683, the spring after Mary met Goodwin, several con-
spirators allegedly attempted to murder Charles II and his brother James
because of the brothers’ Catholic sympathies.11 This intrigue was orga-
nized by Whig conspirators and took its name from a medieval mansion in
Hertfordshire that was leased by one of the conspirators. The plan was to
ambush the royal brothers as they traveled to London on their way back
from the horse races at Newmarket. The brothers’ early return foiled the
plan and several high-profile Whigs were implicated in the plot.
Not only would Mary be aware of the failed assassination attempt
because London was buzzing with the news, but Goodwin was indirectly
involved through his multiple connections to the conspirators. Sir Thomas
Armstrong, a military officer, was well known to Goodwin. He was a sup-
porter of the Duke of Monmouth, Charles II’s eldest illegitimate son,
who was favored by radical Protestants as the heir to the throne instead of
James. While he was in self-appointed exile on the Continent, Armstrong
was indicted for high treason, in absentia, at the Old Bailey in July 1683.
Nearly a year later, he was later captured on his way to Amsterdam. Fol-
lowing his execution on June 20, 1684, his head was displayed at Westmin-
ster Hall and his body was drawn and quartered.12 Goodwin felt intimate
enough with Armstrong to attempt to recruit him as a familiar. George
went to the prison on Goodwin’s behalf just prior to the man’s execution.13
Another collaborator, Robert West, resided at the Middle Temple where
Goodwin kept a room. West, along with several of the other conspirators,
was a member of the Green Ribbon Club, a group of approximately 150
radical, anti-Royalist Whigs named for the green ribbons members wore
in their hats. They met regularly at the King’s Head tavern at Chancery
Lane End. Goodwin had previously been a member of the club, until he
got expelled in January 1679 after he had refused to leave the club room
when a non-member came to speak with him.14 Another suspect in the Rye
House episode was John Wildman, with whom Goodwin and Mary were
engaged in alchemical experiments in the fall of 1683. Goodwin had been
involved with him previously in other alchemical projects. Wildman had
11. Zook, Radical Whigs and Conspiratorial Politics, 103–9.

12. Richard Greaves, “Sir Thomas Armstrong,” DNB.
14. Allen, “Political Clubs in Restoration London”; Jones, “Green Ribbon Club.”

Plots and Piety 171
been incarcerated in the Tower in June 1683, for allegedly discussing the
assassination plot with other conspirators. Apparently, he had refused to
give money to the group to buy weapons for the ambush.15
The political elements of the fairy realm reflect the importance and
prevalence of politics in Goodwin’s life. The Wharton family were major
political players and strong Whig supporters. In order for Goodwin to
reconnect with the world of politics, he needed the support of his father
and brothers. In this regard, the greatest gift that Mary and the spirit world
gave Goodwin was reconciliation with his family. As early as the fall of
1683, Mary encouraged Goodwin to attend his father more frequently,
where on occasion he was given small sums of money. One could be cyn-
ical and suggest that Mary was protecting her own best interests by facili-
tating a reunion between father and son, thereby ensuring that Goodwin
did not get disinherited. But how long would she have to wait for the baron
to die? Mary was much older than Goodwin. And what guarantee did she
have that she could keep Goodwin’s interest for that long? And why would
he need her in his life after he came into his inheritance? Perhaps in the
beginning, Mary’s goals were short-term, as she struggled to find a way out
of their financial difficulties.
By the end of 1684, the angels started giving Goodwin permission
to leave his lodging to attend his father, either at his townhouse in St. Giles
or at his country home at Wooburn. Goodwin’s mandate was “to dispose
his [father’s] mind towards [him] with gentleness” and receive whatever
money he could to pay for their basic necessities. Sometimes the Lord
instructed Goodwin to write “a submissive letter” to his father, for which
the angels provided particular expressions. Because of his prior history
within the family, Goodwin approached these meetings “with fear and
apprehension,” as he attempted to convince his father that he did not spend
his time and money idly and foolishly.16 The occasional visits ultimately
mended fences to the point that Goodwin accompanied the baron to the
port at Dover when Philip left for the Continent in August 1685, after the
Monmouth Rebellion. The following April, Goodwin joined his father in
Holland for several months. Goodwin did all he could to please the elder
Wharton. For months at a time, he stayed with his father at Wooburn. He
would only see Mary when they met at Hounslow for a night, because, of
15. Ashley, John Wildman, Plotter and Postmaster, 8, 48, 239.


172 Chapter 11
course, Mary did not accompany him on these family visits. His extended
sojourns continued throughout 1687. He presented his adventures with
the Lowlander queen and Princess Gartwrott as potential marriage con-
tracts. In spite of many lectures, by October 1687, the baron had softened
his attitude to Goodwin enough that he asked God to bless his son, not an
insignificant gesture from a highly religious man like the baron.
In addition to the spirits’ encouragement in religious and political
matters, Mary took a very active role in those aspects of Goodwin’s life as
well. Although there is no supporting evidence, she reported that half a
dozen times she went to King James II on Goodwin’s behalf. Presumably,
she would have met James when Charles II was still king. While she served
as Thomas Williams’s housekeeper at Whitehall, she was deep in conver-
sation with Charles about alchemical matters one day when his brother
came to the door. In January 1688, Mary took advantage of her previ-
ous position at Whitehall to approach James, who was then king, “below
stairs” in the servants’ quarters, as he was going abroad. She knelt before
him, signaling that she wished to speak with him. When she told him that
she desired the privilege of the court, he replied that she had never been
denied it. A few days later, he granted her an audience. He requested that
she provide a certain plaster she was known to make that prevented mis-
carriages. His second wife, Mary Beatrice of Modena, was desperately
trying to get pregnant so she could provide a male heir to the throne. On
a subsequent visit, James questioned her about the white metal she had
produced for Williams’s household, but she told him she had forgotten
the procedure. He then switched the subject to Goodwin, as it was well
known that she kept company with him. The king was concerned about
the trouble that Goodwin had caused in the past: Goodwin had delivered
a speech against James in Parliament in 1680, during the Exclusion Crisis.
But James assured her that he could forget and forgive past transgressions.
Even if Mary never actually went anywhere near Whitehall or
King James, her story encouraged Goodwin to mend fences and regain a
position at court. Mary enabled Goodwin to gain the confidence neces-
sary to further his political career. The spirit world reinforced this hope,
instructing Goodwin to walk where the king might see him and win his
favor. Obediently, Goodwin went to St. James’s Park, walked the Pall
Mall and the galleries of Whitehall, and attended the playhouse, to put
himself in the king’s sight. Goodwin was hesitant to approach the king
directly, and Lord Wharton refused to act on his son’s behalf. God con-

Plots and Piety 173
stantly encouraged Goodwin to ask his political allies to speak for him.
Unfortunately, James’s reign did not last long enough for Goodwin to
make peace with the king.
The spirit realm continued to support Goodwin’s efforts to secure a
position at court even after William and Mary were installed as the new
monarchs. The angels were not prejudiced by religious considerations; the
Lord himself instructed Goodwin to present himself and kiss their hands.
Like Goodwin’s claim to the fairy realm, William III’s claim to the English
throne was, at least partially, through his wife. William’s mother had been
Charles I’s eldest daughter, Mary, who had been sent to the Low Countries
to marry William’s father, William II of Orange. William III’s wife, Mary,
was James II’s daughter from his first Protestant wife, Anne Hyde. In other
words, the royal couple were first cousins.
Charles’s and James’s Dutch nephew, William of Orange, along

with James’s daughter (William’s wife), had claimed the English throne in a
bloodless coup during the winter of 1688/89. The military intervention by
William III inspired events in the realm of the Lowlanders. Not long after
the Glorious Revolution in April 1689, the Lowlander Duchess of Plym-
outh suggested that Goodwin storm the kingdom at Hounslow with ten or
twelve armed men and seize the most recent pretender to the Lowlander
throne. But before Goodwin could execute a coup, the self-proclaimed
Lowlander king and other key enemies died. Goodwin’s entrance to his
kingdom should have proceeded unhindered. But for the remainder of
1689, further delays occurred: waiting for the return of the Lowlander
pope, who was necessary for Goodwin’s coronation; waiting for special
horses to arrive from the Continent for the coronation procession; waiting
for all the Lowlander heads of state in Europe to unanimously consent to
Goodwin’s position; and waiting for elaborate coronation preparations to
be made, including the building of three triumphal arches, the creation of

174 Chapter 11
a garter studded with diamonds, and the preparation of an extravagant

banquet complete with marzipan and other rarities. Goodwin was getting
very good at waiting.
One of the more interesting delays concerned a letter from the Low-
landers that would acknowledge Goodwin’s position as king. Given Good-
win’s political intimacy with key Uplander Whigs, it is possible that Mary
was aware of a secret letter that had been issued to William III of Orange
in June of 1688. The letter was to serve as proof that William had been
invited by the citizens to intervene in English politics.17 In the case of the
Lowlanders, they had searched their archives to determine whether there
was any precedent for an outsider being king. Then the letter had to pass
through the hands of several judges. When lawyers discovered that Good-
win would be the first Uplander king, they had doubts about proceeding.
They were afraid to subject themselves to a foreigner, which was, no doubt,
a concern for many Uplander Englishmen at the time William arrived
from the Low Countries. When the letter was finally signed and sealed,
delivery was delayed by a violent storm on the first of January 1690 “that
scarce the like hath been seen.”18 Coincidentally, William had also expe-
rienced delays the previous October due to storms that had impeded his
first attempt at invasion. Spirits informed Mary that the wicked weather
interfering with William’s arrival was the result of witchcraft procured by
James II, which had resulted in the destruction of men-of-war anchored
in the harbor. In the end, Goodwin’s planned revolution of the fairy realm
did not turn out as gloriously as William and Mary’s. His fate was more
similar to James II, who was denied his rightful realm.
In February 1690, seven years after George renewed contact with
the fairy realm, Goodwin was informed by the spirits that “a Lord thou
shalt be of this land, not of the Lowlanders, for that is certain unto thee.”19
This revelation came immediately after his election in January as member
of Parliament for Westmorland. His younger brother Henry had previ-
ously held that position. Henry’s premature death the previous fall had
caused Goodwin’s family to finally support his re-entry into politics. In the
next election of March 1690, Goodwin became member of Parliament
17. Tony Claydon, “William III and II (1650–1702), king of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and
prince of Orange,” DNB.
19. Ibid., 2:141.

Plots and Piety 175
for Malmesbury in Wiltshire, a position that he held until 1695. He was

very active in his political role, serving on several committees during his
term of office. In 1695, he was elected member of Parliament for Cocker-
mouth in Cumberland, and later for Buckinghamshire, a position he held
until his death. In February 1694, he was awarded a position as lieutenant-
colonel of horse in the second Earl of Macclesfield’s cavalry regiment and
was subsequently appointed lord commissioner of the Admiralty. He also
served as deputy lieutenant of Buckinghamshire under his brother Tom.20
On February 12, 1696, Philip Wharton was buried at St. Paul’s
Church in Wooburn. Goodwin’s older brother, Tom, of course, became
the next Lord Wharton and inherited the family estates in Buckingham-
shire, Cumberland, and York.21 But Goodwin was not left out of the pic-
ture. He had reconciled with his father to the extent that he inherited his
father’s townhouse on Denmark Street across from St. Giles-in-the-Fields
Church, four other houses in Lloyd’s Court (one block south of Denmark
on present-day Flitcroft Street), manors in Ireland and Yorkshire, tene-
ments in Westmorland, and other holdings.22 Mary and Goodwin moved
into the house in St. Giles, with its stables, coach houses, orchards, gar-
dens, and “watercourses.” The three-story house came complete with all
the “household stuff and implements of household,” including silver and
gold plate.23 The next year, after Goodwin was appointed lord commis-
sioner of the Admiralty, the couple moved into a country estate north of
Colnbrook in Buckinghamshire, which Goodwin leased from the Apsley
family.24 After more than a decade, Mary was the (unofficial) partner of
a landed gentleman. Mary and Goodwin continued to have contact with
the Lowlanders until Mary’s death, but their adventures in the fairy realm
were ultimately overshadowed by other escapades above ground.
As the hero of Mary’s elaborate story, Goodwin had completed his
journey of self-discovery and slain the metaphorical dragon.
20. Clark, Goodwin Wharton, 261–63, 299, 314, 318–19; Roy Porter, “Wharton, Goodwin (1653–1704),
politician and autobiographer,” DNB; Journal of the House of Commons, Vol. 11, 1693–1697, 17 Novem-
ber 1696, pp. 587–88; Dalton, English Army Lists and Commission Registers, 1661–1714, 5:232.
22. TNA, PROB 11/430, fols. 181–82, Will of Philip Wharton; TNA, PROB 11/481, fols. 132–33,
Will of Goodwin Wharton.
23. TNA, PROB 11/430, fols. 181–82, Will of Philip Wharton.

176 Chapter 11
So was Mary’s magical practice a deceit? Was this the completion

of the long con? Was Goodwin really such a good mark? Let’s review the
evidence. When Mary first met Goodwin, he must have seemed like a good
prospect for a scam: he was the son of a baron, he relieved her immedi-
ate difficulties with a little money, and he moved her out of her wretched
lodgings into a house in Shire Lane. But within a month, Mary had to
move from the Shire Lane lodging, leaving behind some of her belongings
because Goodwin could not pay the rent. On one occasion when they
stayed at Hounslow, Goodwin could barely pay for the inn, and he was
forced to pawn some of his clothes when they returned to London. During
the first three years of their relationship, they moved half a dozen times to
what Goodwin described as “the basest houses” in London.25 Even then,
they often had to pay the rent by pawning. During that first summer of
1683, before the relationship took on a sexual component, Mary must have
realized that she had not struck the mother lode.
In the early days of their relationship, Goodwin prohibited Mary
from continuing her craft as a cunning woman. Right from the beginning,
Goodwin wanted Mary’s talents exclusively for himself. Although he “did
not fear [he] should let her want,”26 his meager allowance from his father
could not support the couple while they waited for the spirit realm to bring
their projects to fruition. The credit on which an aristocratic gentleman
usually operated was ruined by Goodwin’s past entrepreneurial failures. In
addition to Goodwin’s daily shortage of money, he was constantly at risk
of arrest for his debts. Most of the time, Lord Wharton was so disgusted
with his son’s lifestyle that he wouldn’t relieve his financial straits with more
than a few shillings at a time.
Granted, there were occasions when Goodwin had some funds from
his father, and sometimes when he went to Wooburn, he left five or ten
pounds at Mary’s disposal, which was a relatively large amount of money.
He maintained that she was careful to keep a precise account of how she
spent any of the funds. On other occasions, she refused his offer of money.
For instance, when he left to join his father on the Continent, Goodwin

26. Ibid., 1:71.

Plots and Piety 177
had a great deal of trouble to persuade Mary to take half of his money at
hand, even though she was supposedly days away from giving birth. After
three years together, did she still feel the need to dissemble, or was she gen-
uinely concerned about his welfare over hers?
Eventually, it was necessary for Mary to continue her former calling,
resolving “questions of future things” and practicing physic. By the fall of
1685, the couple were dependent on what she could get “up and down
among patients,” who, according to Goodwin, “hunted on all occasions
after her as after a Goddess.”27 By the end of 1687, Mary was back to her
practice of buying and selling goods. On at least one occasion, Goodwin
suspected that the textiles she was buying were stolen. The theft and trade
of clothing was a very common practice at the time.28 Goodwin’s inner
voice assured him that it was all right to make a profit from the goods, and
the Lord would deal with the original thief in his own way. The bottom
line is that Mary was not along for a free ride and was not enjoying a life-
style above her status as a single woman of the middling sort. In fact, at
many times in their relationship, she was supporting Goodwin.
The couple’s romance was not all roses either. In addition to the
financial problems, or perhaps because of them, the couple had fre-
quent disputes. Mary’s high temperament was probably not always an
act put on to manipulate Goodwin. In October 1683, due to lack of
funds, Goodwin was forced to sneak Mary up four flights of stairs to the
room he sublet at the Temple. On one particular evening, she sensed
that this was a nuisance to him and interpreted this as a sign that he
did not appreciate all she did for him as liaison to the Lowlanders, in
addition to all the hardships she endured for his sake. She flew into one
of her infamous passions and threatened to leave that very instant and
send his sons (yet unborn) to him at a later date. In his efforts to pacify
her, Goodwin offered to marry her the next morning (Mr. Parish having
died the previous June). Eventually, he got her to bed that night. But
Mary did not grab that opportunity to secure her future as the wife
of an elite gentleman. The next morning, she calmly refused his offer
on the grounds that she did not want to injure his reputation in the
world. Besides, she already considered him her husband in the eyes of
the Lord. Of course, Goodwin would probably have been disinherited if
27. Ibid., 1:195, 239, 71.

28. Lemire, “Theft of Clothes and Popular Consumerism in Early Modern England,” 257.

178 Chapter 11
he had married a woman so much below his station, which was counter
to Mary’s best interests.
Whatever was going on in Mary’s head, we know from Goodwin’s
comments that he was quite attached to her. In the summer of 1684, when
the angel Gabriel ordered Goodwin to wait upon his father at Wooburn,
Goodwin lamented their separation: “our kindness was now so true & so
real, that such a parting having never been before above so many hours
asunder of little more since we knew one another.” And by August 1686,
after their long separation while he was in Europe, and when Mary was at
risk of dying, Goodwin reported that he couldn’t keep the tears from his
eyes whenever he thought of losing her. His loyalty overrode the opinion
of his family, who called Mary a whore and a witch and chastised him for
his relationship. Goodwin’s commitment to his partnership with Mary is
evident in the fact that he turned down the opportunity to marry a desir-
able, real-life woman his father suggested as a match, preferring to take his
chances with the unions Mary was arranging in the spirit realm—unions
that would have allowed him to continue his relationship with Mary. Good-
win also acknowledged that Mary had saved him from a life of debauchery
similar to his brothers. Although the Lord pointed out that he had not
been as pure as he could have been, without Mary he would have “run
farther into sin.”29
In assessing Mary’s role in Goodwin’s life, it is only fitting to allow
Goodwin to have the last word: “for I believe it is unpossible to love one
more than she hath me a long time.”30
29. Autobiography of Goodwin Wharton, 1:138, 340, 2:112.

30. Ibid., 2:21.

Epilogue
April 1703
In January 1703, Mary became desperately ill, and after a brief respite,
she died on April 18 at the age of seventy-two. Goodwin was left alone.
As he sat in vigil beside her corpse, he waited. After the brief funeral at St.
Giles Church across the street from their townhouse on Denmark Street,
he waited. He revisited the spot where George had first appeared to Mary
in Moorfields, and he waited. But as the hours turned into days and the
days turned into weeks, Goodwin had to accept the reality that Mary was
not returning to him in spirit as she had promised. And on top of this dev-
astating disappointment, no angels came to him to offer consolation, and
the Lord no longer spoke to him audibly from behind the door, but now
Goodwin heard him only in visions. Hoping to see the Lowlanders, Good-
win visited Hounslow Heath, but he could neither hear nor see them. He
had lost more than his twenty-year companion; he had lost his connection
to the spirit world.
During the last few years of Mary’s life, the spirit world had been
delivering bags of gold and riches from Hounslow, Ratcliff, Northend,
and the other treasure sites. Goodwin had often heard the angels “hard at
work” in the closet.1 The couple had been promised on almost a daily basis
that they would be allowed to open the trunks the angels were filling, but
they were constantly put off until “tomorrow.” After Mary’s death, with no
direction forthcoming from the spirit world, Goodwin finally opened the
trunks to find them all empty.

179

180 Epilogue
As disappointing as this was, Mary’s death did not change Good-

win’s financial status. The couple had never gotten any treasure from the
various sites. But in addition to helping Goodwin reconcile with his family
and re-enter the world of politics, Mary bequeathed to Goodwin some-
thing better than chests full of treasure. She gave him an heir. The first few
years of Goodwin’s journal were addressed to the couple’s first surviving
boy child, Peregrine, who was being raised by a nurse. On several occa-
sions, Goodwin had attempted to see him. Mary told Goodwin that she
was afraid that if the nurse saw him, she would instantly know the boy’s
parentage because of the striking resemblance between father and son, an
obvious stroke to Goodwin’s male ego. On several occasions, Mary was
supposed to meet the nurse in a tavern while Goodwin waited in an ad-
joining room to spy on them. But there was always one excuse or another:
the child’s clothes were being washed or he was undressed at the appoint-
ed time. Nevertheless, Goodwin was careful to provide for the boy even
before he met his own needs. Despite his concern for Peregrine, Goodwin
was destined never to see his first son’s face. Eventually, Goodwin stops
mentioning Peregrine in his journal. Perhaps the boy died and Goodwin
somehow neglected to record it.
Hezekiah, on the other hand, was a different story. On March 10,
1687, Mary had delivered twins: Hezekiah and Susanna. Susanna had
died at one month old. But Goodwin had had a prophetic vision that said
his second surviving son would give him great comfort. At first, there were
delays in seeing the child, similar to the case with Peregrine. But when the
boy was almost one year old, Mary and Goodwin went together to deliver
him to a different nurse. Goodwin reported that “as soon as the child saw
me he flew to me, & with all the fondness imaginable would never be out
of my arms ’till I was obliged to get away.”2 Hezekiah was presumably fos-
tered by a nurse for his entire childhood. In addition to the secretive nature
of Mary and Goodwin’s relationship, Hezekiah was illegitimate in the eyes
of the law. For this reason, the boy was raised under the surname Knowles
to protect Goodwin from scandal. Knowles may have been the surname
of one of the nurses who raised him; Goodwin never addresses this issue
in his journal. Eventually, Hezekiah became a part of Goodwin’s life. At
some point, probably after Mary’s death, Hezekiah moved into the house
2. Ibid., 1:102.

April 1703 181
on Denmark Street with Goodwin. During the year following the loss of
Mary, the young man, now approximately seventeen years old, “prov’d
very mad & very rebellious.”3 In February of 1704, he ran away to sea.
Goodwin used his political sway to bring him back to England.
After Mary’s death, Goodwin’s health began to deteriorate. He had
suffered from weakness for several years, ever since “a fit of Appoplex” in
March of 1698.4 For several months before his death on October 26, 1704,
he had been bedridden. He was blistered and scarred all over, possibly
from being bled in an attempt to cure him. On his deathbed, Goodwin
wrote a will dated September 30, 1704. Besides bequeathing his entire
estate to Hezekiah, Goodwin declared him as his “lawfully begotten son.”5
He also reconsidered Hezekiah’s career choice in the military and helped
to get him a commission as an ensign to Colonel Roger Elliott’s infantry
regiment. At the time of Goodwin’s death, Hezekiah was serving as a lieu-
tenant of grenadiers under Colonel Elliott in the garrison of Gibraltar. By
this time, he was officially known as Hezekiah Wharton.6
As Goodwin’s heir, Hezekiah probably received word of his father’s
death and his inheritance. But unfortunately, he never got to enjoy his new-
found wealth. He died sometime in October 1705 in Gibraltar. As he lay sick
and dying, Hezekiah wrote a will in which he appointed Talbot Lloyd as his
executor and requested that 600 pounds be directed to “Jane Lockhearte,
spinster.”7 The designation of spinster was common in legal records when a
woman was not a wife or a widow. It did not have the same connotations as it
does now, referring to an older, never-married woman. The will does not hint
at the relationship between Lockheart and Hezekiah, but 600 pounds was a
very substantial amount of money. It is tempting to think that Jane Lockheart
played a motherly role, either real or imagined, in the young boy’s life.
3. Ibid., 2:182.
4. Ibid., 2:179.
5. Ibid; TNA, PROB 11/481, Will of Goodwin Wharton. In Goodwin’s will, he appointed his steward
John Harrison as Hezekiah’s guardian for three years. However, Goodwin failed to appoint an execu-
tor of his will. After his death, the Wharton family contested the will. They accepted Hezekiah as the
legal heir, but did not want John Harrison as the executor. The courts appointed Alexander Hall as
both guardian and executor. See TNA, PROB 18/28/34, 18/28/91, and 18/28/96. In retaliation,
Harrison convinced Hezekiah to make a will in May 1705 appointing Harrison as executor.
6. Dalton, English Army Lists and Commission Registers, 1661–1714, 5:176.
7. TNA, PROB 20/2743, Will of Hezekiah Wharton. This will was contested as well. In a decision dat-
ed January 1708, the Gibraltar will was judged invalid, but a subsequent ruling dated February 1711
appointed Talbot Lloyd’s widow, Elizabeth Lloyd, as administrator. A note was added to the probate
of Goodwin’s will dated December 7, 1711.

182 Epilogue
The appearance of Hezekiah as a flesh and blood son raises ques-

tions about the issue of reality versus imagination in Mary’s alternate
world. Were Peregrine and Hezekiah actually Mary’s children? If not,
were they part of a scam on Mary’s part? To what purpose? Were the
ongoing pregnancies and surviving children false constructions to create
a deeper bond with Goodwin? If she kept the money that was supposedly
paid to midwives and the babies’ nurses, what did she do with it? For the
first decade of their relationship, she was forced to live in poverty with
Goodwin to maintain the illusion. Was she setting aside a nest egg for the
future? Or did she use those funds to buy all that paraphernalia for the
altar that supposedly came from the angels? Like the many mysteries sur-
rounding Mary’s life, we will never know the answers. All we know for sure
is that Mary performed her magic in ways that created a rich tapestry that
touched many lives besides hers and Goodwin’s.

183

184
Figure 17. Seventeenth-century map of London,

originally started by Wenceslaus Hollar, ca. 1690
1. Long Acre (Long Aker) 7. The Temple

2. Covent Garden 8. Lincoln’s Inn Fields
3. Leicester House (Lester Field) (Lincons in Fields)
4. Lambeth 9. Lud Gate
5. Old Street 10. St. Paul’s Cathedral
6. Shire Lane (Sheere Lane) (St. Paul’s Church)

185
11. St. Paul’s Church, Covent Garden 17. New Bedlam

12. Snow Hill 18. Somerset
13. Newgate 19. Whitehall
14. Ratcliff 20. St. James’s Park
15. The Tower 21. Pall Mall (Pell Mell)
16. Moorfields 22. St. Giles-in-the-Field Church

Appendix
A Timeline of Mary’s Life

The nature of Mary’s narrative makes it very difficult to accurately pin-
point the events that she mentions in her life. There is very little archival
information to support the details. The timeline below is drawn primarily
from Goodwin’s autobiography; other sources are cited in the notes.
May 29, 1630 �� Born in Turville, Buckinghamshire

ca. 1636–37 �� Grandfather West showed her where he found the pot
of money
ca. 1637–38 �� First contact with the fairies (not yet eight years old)
ca. 1635–38 �� Attended a primary school in Watlington, Oxfordshire
ca. 1638–39 �� Went to live with Uncle John Tomson near Chelmsford,
Essex
ca. 1639 �� Got grimoire from German man (not above ten years old)
ca. 1640–42 �� Started boarding school at Hackney
ca. 1642–43 �� Went to France with Lady Osborne and her family
ca. 1643–44 �� Married Mr. Boucher, a tailor from London (age
thirteen or so, mother was dead by this point)
ca. 1644–45 �� Went to London to live with her husband Boucher
(between fourteen and fifteen years old, after more
than twelve months in Turville)
ca. 1645–52 �� Gave birth to seven daughters in less than seven years
ca. 1651–52 �� Boucher died
March 8, 1653 �� Goodwin Wharton born
187

188 Appendix
ca. 1652–58 �� Lived as a widow for five or six years; maintained
tailoring shop
ca. 1658–61 �� Spent eighteen months in Ludgate prison; met George
Whitmore
ca. 1659–61 �� George executed when she was about one year in
Ludgate
ca. 1659–61 �� Married Mr. Lawrence of Berkshire, soldier and
seaman
ca. 1661–1668 �� Gave birth to thirteen more daughters
ca. 1664 to 1668 �� Practiced alchemy while Lawrence was away at sea
ca. 1664–66 �� Plague hit London; fourteen of Mary’s children died
1666 �� London fire; lost everything
ca. 1666–67 �� Uncle John took daughter by Lawrence
1668 �� Mr. Lawrence died [October 1668?]1
ca. 1668–69 �� Dug for treasure at Islington, guarded by Archbishop
Laud
1669 �� Alchemical furnaces destroyed by Prince Rupert
June 17, 1669 �� Married Thomas Parish of St. Paul’s, Covent Garden,
widower2
ca. April–May 1670 �� Left Parish after almost twelve months
ca. 1670 �� First contact with the fairies at Hounslow Heath
ca. 1670 �� Became pregnant by Parish, when “very near” age forty
ca. early 1671 �� Son christened Thomas, sent to France to live with an
uncle of Mary
ca. 1675 �� Banished from fairy realm
ca. 1675 �� Lawsuit for alimony, after loss of contact with fairies
ca. 1675–77 �� First broken leg
ca. 1675–78 �� Alchemical experiment for three and a half years, after
alimony suit
ca. 1678–80 �� Lived at Whitehall with Dr. Thomas Williams
1. One Vincent Lawrence was buried October 11, 1668, according to the St. Sepulchre parish register.
Unfortunately, the register notes when the deceased is a daughter, son, wife, or servant, but never lists
a man as husband of so-and-so.
2. LMA, Parish Records for St. Mary, Bromley St. Leonard [Microfilm X040/006B].

A Timeline of Mary’s Life 189
ca. 1680 �� Moved out of Whitehall

ca. 1680–82 �� Lived at Long Acre in a house by herself for several
years
early 1682 �� Dismissed George, pawned grimoire, moved to poor
residence close to Long Acre
winter of 1682/3 �� Broke leg for the second time
February 1683 �� Met Goodwin Wharton (he was thirty years old, she
was fifty-two)
beginning of April �� Moved to Shire Lane
end of April 1683 �� Moved from Shire Lane to Arundell buildings; recalled
George, renewed contact with fairies
May 1, 1683 �� Hired coach and four to meet fairy queen at Hounslow
end of May 1683 �� Floods on Hounslow Heath
June 1683 �� Death of Thomas Parish; Mary, “fat and heavy,” fell
from horse
June 1683 �� Rye House Plot
July 24, 1683 �� Death of fairy king and beginning of sexual relationship
with Goodwin
spring 1684 �� Established contact with angels
May 1684 �� Switched from Catholicism to Protestantism
September 1684 �� Lowlander gunpowder plot
1685 �� Goodwin Wharton started his autobiography
January 1685 �� Moved to Long Acre
June 1686 �� Queen Penelope died
June 1687 �� Princess Ursula La Gard died
December 1687 �� Deep-sea diving projects started
March 1690 �� Goodwin became member of Parliament
February 12, 1696 �� Philip Wharton buried
April 18, 1703 �� Mary Parish died at St. Giles-in-the-Fields3
October 26, 1704 �� Goodwin Wharton died at St. Giles-in-the-Fields4
3. LMA, X105/022.
4. LMA, X105/022. “The Hon’ble Goodwin Wharton caryd away.”

Bibliography
DNB = Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Online edition:
http://www.oxforddnb.com/
OED = Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Online edition: www.
oed.com.
Manuscripts
BL = British Library, London
551.a.32—Collection of 231 Advertisements
Additional MS 20006–20007, Autobiography of Goodwin Wharton
Additional MS 36674
Sloane 1727, Secreta Secretorum
Sloane 3850
Sloane 3851
Bod. = Bodleian Library, Oxford
Ashmole 1406
Buckinghamshire Record Office, Aylesbury
Turville Parish Records
Guild Hall, London
Freedom Admission Register 1638–1708, Guildhall MS 6215
Merchant Taylors Company Membership Guide (1997)
St. Giles-in-the-Fields Parish Register
LMA = London Metropolitan Archive
Parish Records for St. Mary, Bromley St. Leonard
Newgate Gaol Delivery Records
TNA = The National Archives, Kew, Richmond, Surrey
C (Chancery) 3/288/39, Rogers vs Rogers
PROB (Probate) 11/430, fols. 181–82, Will of Philip Wharton
191

192 Bibliography
PROB (Probate) 11/481, fols. 132–33, Will of Goodwin Wharton

PROB (Probate) 32/46/3, Inventory of Goodwin Wharton
Somerset Record Office, Taunton
Q/SR 146/25
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Index
Bold indicates an illustration or image.
A Bodenham, Anne, 18
Bottom, Mrs., 82–88, 90
Abab, Mr., 155–56, 158–59 Boucher, Mr. (1st husband of MP), 56,
Agrippa, 22, 65, 72 72–77, 81, 88, 128
alchemy, 148–51, 150
Goodwin as alchemist, 152
and Jews, 156 C
Mary as alchemist, 81, 154–55, 158,
Campbell, Archibald (9th Earl of Argyll),
162, 170
163, 165
and Prince Rupert, 153
Carleton, Mary, 113–14
spiritual alchemy, 8–9
Catherine of Braganza (wife of Charles II),
angels, 35, 108, 114, 137–47
46n35, 47, 120, 156
Ahab, 139–40, 144, 147, 155–56
Catholicism
and diving, 164–65
in England, 17, 28–29, 45, 55, 72,
Gabriel, 140–42, 144, 167, 178
120, 165, 168–70
and Goodwin, 112, 167, 171, 173,
and exorcism, 126
179
and George, 60
Michael, 116, 140–41
and Mary, 30, 45–46, 75, 114,
and pregnancy, 102
142–43, 167
Uriel, 118, 138–40
and spirit world, 43–45, 48, 93, 168
Anne (queen of England), 98, 173
Cavendish, Margaret (Duchess of Newcas-
Armstrong, Sir Thomas, 170
tle), 65
Arundel Buildings, 54
Charles I (king of England), 29, 119
astrology, 23
Charles II (king of England), 68, 160, 162
and alchemy, 161
and alchemy, 154, 172
and charms, 21–23, 27, 50, 72
and bastards, 46
and conception, 105
and Catholicism, 28–29, 169–70
and hidden treasure, 119
and Jews, 156
and magic, 19–20
charms
and medicine, 14, 140
and astrology, 22, 72
and prognostication, 54, 66, 81
and gambling, 20–22, 28, 50
and healing, 15, 143
B and love, 72, 84, 99, 112
See also talismans
Bacon, Francis, 40n21, 149 Clayton, Robert, 54, 66, 158n21
Baxter, Richard, 35, 56, 136–37
205

206 Index
Clinton, Elizabeth (Countess of Lincoln), Fryar, Father, 43, 46–47, 49, 50, 93,
88 103, 124–25, 159, 162
Cox, John, 14 Goodwin and, 35–36, 47–48, 51–53,
Cox, Mary (née Butler), 14 93–94
Crockford, Frances, 89 invisibility of, 49–51, 125
Crooke, Helkiah, 100–101, 105 king of, 42–43, 46–48, 51–52, 71–72,
Culpeper, Nicholas, 49, 51, 132, 135 91, 95–96, 121
cunning craft, 14, 66, 72, 79, 143, 145 LaGard, Penelope (queen), 47, 51–53,
and divination, 65, 81 71, 94–98, 102, 112, 159
and gambling, 94 LaPerle, Ursula (princess), 96–99,
and healing, 14–17 107, 113, 134
and religion, 14–15 Mary and, 34, 37, 39, 41–49, 53
and treasure hunting, 119 methods for summoning, 36–37
and witchcraft, 18, 40 Plymouth, Duchess of, 99, 173
religion of, 43–46, 168
Shashbesh, Thomas, 131
D familiars, 40, 55–56, 63, 120, 124, 135–37,
debts 170. See also Whitmore, George
and debtor’s prison, 56–58, 77–79, 88 Fawkes, Guy, and Gunpowder Plot,
and Goodwin, 32, 106, 142–43, 146, 168–69
160, 176 Ficino, Marsilio, on power of the will, 8
Dee, John, 118, 139, 140n14, 144 fire engines, 32–33, 33
Defoe, Daniel Flamel, Nicholas, 156
on childbearing, 101, 103–4 Floyd, Lady, 154
on Hackney schools for girls, 73 Forman, Simon, 119
demons, 55, 136–37, 141
and alchemy, 148
and exorcism, 17–18 G
fairies as, 35–36, 43 Galenic medicine, 15–16
as succubi/incubi, 93 gambling, 20–21, 30, 32, 34, 94, 119, 131
and treasure hunting, 126–27 and charms, 20–22, 28, 50
and witchcraft, 40–41 Garroll, Mr., 121, 153
demoniacs, 17–18 Gartwrott, Anne, 113, 172
Denmark Street, 175, 179, 181 Gay, Cecilia, 116
diving projects, Goodwin and, 109, 115, George (familiar spirit). See Whitmore,
162–65, 163 George
Glorious Revolution, 173
Glover, Henry, 28, 34
E Greenhill, Elizabeth, 101
education of girls, 72–74, 77 grimoires, 19–20
Elliott, Colonel Roger, 181 Mary’s grimoire, 19–20, 67, 70, 72, 78,
Exclusion Crisis, 169, 172 122, 152, 158
exorcism. See under demons recipes/instructions in, 20, 50,
122–23, 126–27, 137–38
Gunpowder Plot, 168–69
F
fairies (Lowlanders), 43, 44
beliefs about, 39, 49

Index 207
H M
Hackney school. See education of girls macrocosm/microcosm, 21
Harrison, John, 181n5 magic, 19, 21, 36, 55, 65, 119, 137, 139
Henrietta Maria (wife of Charles I), 120 and alchemy, 148
charms, 22, 72, 99
Hounslow Heath, 37, 38, 39, 169, 179 circles, 20, 137
fairy (Lowlander) kingdom at, 41–43, and familiars, 56, 63
46–47, 51–52, 97, 99, 129, 162, Mary and, 20, 22, 28, 63, 65, 72, 99,
173 122, 126, 138, 143, 146, 176,
and treasure hunting, 121–22, 182
125–27, 131, 179 and religion, 8, 14, 18, 28–29, 45–46,
visits of Mary and Goodwin to, 126, 137–38, 143
51–53, 71–72, 81, 91, 171, 176 and scrying, 140
wands, 122
and worldview, 7–8, 10
I magical realism, 10
imagination, power of, 5, 8–10, 64–65, 99 Margaret (Countess of Henneberg), 108
and conception, 105, 110 marriage, 79, 87, 114
Ivy, Lady Theodosia, 114–15, 164 age of girls at, 76
and Mary, 72–87
and social/economic status, 14,
J 29–30, 76, 92, 131
James I (king of England; James VI of and widows, 77, 79, 82–83, 92–93,
Scotland), 168 23n34
on fairies, 35, 42–43 Mary II (queen of England), 98, 165, 173
James II (king of England), 115, 147, 160, Mary Beatrice of Modena (consort of
169–70, 172–74 James II), 115, 147, 172
Jonson, Ben, 94, 151 Maubray, Thomas, 105
medicine. See physic
menstruation, 53, 97–98
K age of ceasing, 100–101
customs related to, 51, 139
Kingsbury, Anne, 123
Monmouth’s Rebellion, 160, 162, 170–71
Knowles, Hezekiah. See Wharton, Heze-
Moorfields, 64, 69, 90, 179, 185
kiah
L N
natural philosophy, 21, 105, 148, 154
Laud, William (archbishop of Canterbury),
and science, 14
119–20, 136
Neville, Henry (5th Earl of Westmorland),
Lawrence, Mr. (2nd husband of MP),
118–19
78–82, 88–90, 96, 119, 152
Newgate Prison, 59–60, 185
Lilly, William, 35, 119, 123
Nurse, Mrs., 39–40
Lloyd, Talbot, 181
Lockheart, Jane, 181
Long Acre, 21, 27, 106, 130, 142, 184 O
Ludgate Prison, 57, 57–59, 184
Mary in, 56–60, 65, 78–79 Oates, Titus, 146n31, 169

208 Index
Oliver, Mr., 16 wprisons

Osborne, Lady Dorothy, 73, 158n21 Ludgate Prison, 57, 58–59, 65, 184
Osborne, Thomas (1st Earl of Danby), Newgate Prison, 59–60, 185
73n4 Protestantism
in England, 17, 29, 45, 48, 69, 72,
136, 142, 166, 170
P and magic, 29
Paracelsus, 15, 35–36, 137, 161 and Mary, 45
Parish, Mary and the spirit world, 167–68
as alchemist, 81, 131, 152–62 providence, 153, 165–66
and business, 67, 77–79
childhood of, 12–14, 37, 132
children of, 88–90, 101–10, 182 R
as cunning woman, 14–23, 27, 66, 72, Raleigh, Walter, 154
81, 119, 122, 143, 176 Ramsey, David, 119
encounters with angels, 9, 102, 108, Ratcliff, 131–33, 162, 179, 185
112, 138–47, 164, 167–68 Reynalde, Thomas, 104–5
encounters with demons, 12, 17–18, Rogers, Thomas, 94
40, 126–27, 136, 141 Rupert, Prince, 81, 114, 120–21, 153
encounters with fairies, 34, 37, 39, Rye House Plot, 159, 170
41–49, 53
marriages of, 72–87
practice of physic, 14–16, 51, 54, 65, S
78, 84, 91, 97, 112, 129, 154, St. Giles-in-the-Fields, 61, 89, 175, 185
177 St. James’s Park, 37, 129–30, 132, 134,
pregnancies of, 4, 85, 89, 100–110, 172, 185
138, 182 Scot, Reginald, 56, 68, 72, 122
religion of, 3, 45, 75, 143, 167–68 scrying, 137–40, 142, 167
and spiritual alchemy, 9 Seymour, Mrs., 70
Parish, Thomas (3rd husband of MP), Shakespeare, William
81–88, 91, 177 fairies in Midsummer Night’s Dream, 94
Parish, Thomas (son of MP), 86, 90 Sharp, Jane, 100–101, 105
Partridge, Mr., 17 Shirburn Castle, 96
pawning, 24, 28, 54, 66–67, 70, 87, 102, Shire Lane, 33, 54, 176, 184
159, 176 Stonor family, 45–46
Pepys, Samuel, 73 succubus, 93
Philosopher’s Stone, 131, 148, 153, 158,
162
physic, 14–16, 22–24, 97, 149, 150 T
and fairies, 91, 97 talismans, 20–22, 27–28, 144
impostume (abcess), 129 theurgy, 137
Mary’s practice of, 14–16, 51, 54, 78, Tobermory, 162–63
83–84, 112, 152, 154, 177 Toft, Mary, 109–10
practitioners of, 23, 66 Tomson, John (uncle of MP), 14, 18–19,
treatments, 15–16, 96, 129, 132, 135 72, 78, 88, 90
Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, on power Tomson, Mr. (father of MP), 14, 73–75
of the will, 8 Tonge, Israel, 146n31, 169
Popish Plot, 146n31, 169–70 Travell, Thomas, 164–65

Index 209
treasure Wharton, Peregrine (son of MP and GW),

buried, 36, 118, 129–30, 136–37 6, 103–4, 180, 182
sunken, 164–65
treasure hunting, 14, 114, 118–35, 153, Wharton, Philip (4th baron; father of
160, 179–80 GW), 29–31, 144, 146, 171–72,
and cunning people, 14, 39, 55–56, 175–76
81 Wharton, Thomas (brother of GW), 30,
sites of, 129–30 111, 175
Hounslow Heath, 121–22, 125–27, Whitmore, George, 47, 136, 179
131, 179 and Goodwin, 67–69, 170
Ratcliff, 131–33, 162, 179 imprisonment and execution of,
St. James’s Park, 129–30, 132 59–64
Turville, 12, 13, 14, 19, 29, 31, 39, 45, as Mary’s familiar spirit, 58–69,
74–75, 127 71, 78, 91, 94, 102, 113, 121,
Twisden, Sir Thomas, 87–88 123–25, 157, 159, 162, 168
Tyburn, 60–63, 62 Wilder, Mrs., 111–13
Wildman, John, 159–62, 170–71
William III, 98, 165, 173–74
V Williams, Thomas, 154–57, 172
Villiers, George (2nd Duke of Bucking- Wilmot, John (2nd Earl of Rochester), 56,
ham), 54, 110, 158–59, 161 110
witch, witches, 14, 18, 39–41, 55, 120, 137
witchcraft, 8, 14, 17–18, 21, 35,
W 39–41, 94, 118, 174, 178
Wallbank, Mr., 119 and Mary, 17–18, 39–41, 178
wand, 93, 123–26 Wolsey, Cardinal Thomas, 130–31
Watts, Ann, 122 women
West, Richard, 127 and childbirth, 103–4
Wharton, Goodwin as cunning women, 14–15, 18, 40,
and alchemy, 152 145
and debts, 32, 106, 142–43, 146, 160, education of, 72–74, 77
176 marriage of, 74, 76, 79, 83, 93
and diving, 109, 115, 162–65 pregnancy and conception
and fire engines, 32–33 and age of women, 100–101
and gambling, 20–22, 28, 32, 34 early modern ideas about, 65,
family background of, 29–31 100–101, 104–5, 109–10
political career of, 167, 170–71, multiple conceptions (superfeta-
174–75, 180 tion), 101–2, 106–9
relationship with father, 30–31, 107, widows, 23n34, 77, 79, 82–83, 93
113, 144, 146–47, 167, 171, 178, Wooburn Manor, 29–31, 31, 107, 147,
180 171, 175–76, 178
Wharton, Henry (brother of GW), 111,
174
Wharton, Hezekiah (son of MP and GW),
107–8, 180–82
Wharton, Jane Goodwin (mother of GW),
29–30

About the Author
Frances Timbers holds a PhD in British history from the University of
Toronto (2008). She has a long-standing relationship with Trent Univer-
sity in Peterborough, Ontario, where she is a sessional lecturer. Her dis-
sertation research was published as Magic and Masculinity: Ritual Magic and
Gender in the Early Modern Era (I. B. Taurus, 2014). An essay entitled “Mary
Squires: A Case Study in Constructing Gypsy Identity in Eighteenth-Cen-
tury England” was included in Worth and Repute: Valuing Gender in Late Me-
dieval and Early Modern Europe (Centre for Reformation and Renaissance
Studies, 2011). Timbers also has two peer-reviewed articles: “Witches’ Sect
or Prayer Meeting? Matthew Hopkins Revisited” in Women’s History Review
(2008), and “Liminal Language: Boundaries of Magic and Honor in Early
Modern Essex” in Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft (2007).
Timbers’ recent research examines English gypsies in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, with the help of a two-year postdoctoral fellow-
ship funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of
Canada (SSHRC) at the University of Victoria, British Columbia. That
research will be published in ‘The Damned Fraternitie’: Constructing Gypsy Iden-
tity in Early Modern England, 1500–1700 (Ashgate, 2016).
211

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The Magical Adventures of Mary Parish

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Early Modern Studies Series

Editorial Board of Early Modern Studies

Christopher Celenza Robert V. Schnucker

Barbara B. Diefendorf Nicholas Terpstra

Paula Findlen Margo Todd

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Jane Campbell Hutchison Merry Wiesner-Hanks

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Cover art: Gordon Napier, Alchemy woodcut. Used with permission.

Cover design: Theresa Wheeler

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

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MaryParish-Timbers.indb 7 11/20/15 1:24 PM

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12. A plaque at the site of Tyburn (photo by author). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62

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MaryParish-Timbers.indb 11 11/20/15 1:24 PM

MaryParish-Timbers.indb 1 11/20/15 1:24 PM

April 18, 1703

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2. Autobiography of Goodwin Wharton, 1:181.

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Down the Rabbit Hole

Ever drifting down the stream—­

—­Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

MaryParish-Timbers.indb 5 11/20/15 1:24 PM

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3. Davis, Fiction in the Archives, 4, 29, 43.

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socially and emotionally to a wider spiritual world.6 In the 1970s, histo-

6. Wax and Wax, “Magical World View.”

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there had been a philosophical or meditative aspect to the practice, the

11. Sheppard, “Alchemy: Origin or Origins?” 37.

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possibly changing her circumstances. Facts were irrelevant to the process.

14. Bowers, Magic(al) Realism, 3–­4.

MaryParish-Timbers.indb 10 11/20/15 1:24 PM

impediments bad luck or good management? Were the delays a result of

MaryParish-Timbers.indb 11 11/20/15 1:24 PM

1. Autobiography of Goodwin Wharton, 1:91.

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Figure 2. Seventeenth-­century timber-­framed cottage in the village of Turville (photo by

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MaryParish-Timbers.indb 14 11/20/15 1:24 PM

Goodwin gave many examples of Mary’s experiences as a cunning

MaryParish-Timbers.indb 15 11/20/15 1:24 PM

9. Willis, London Practice of Physick, 238–­42.

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In another case that Mary related to Goodwin, a laborer from the

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15. Autobiography of Goodwin Wharton, 1:40.

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17. Davies, Grimoires.

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fragments of published texts. Material from authoritative authors was sup-

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26. Autobiography of Goodwin Wharton, 1:64.

Ever drifting down the stream—

—Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

14. Bowers, Magic(al) Realism, 3–4.

Figure 2. Seventeenth-century timber-framed cottage in the village of Turville (photo by

9. Willis, London Practice of Physick, 238–42.

Goodwin’s father was a well-known political actor and aristocrat, which

13. Bod. Ashmole 1406, fols. 50–53.

29. Herrick, Poetical Works, ed. Martin, 90–93.

2. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 587–95.