Thomas Thornton, a tanner with reformed religious convictions, underwent a transformation in 1647 when influenza took the lives of four of his six children and Connecticut authorities hanged his next-door neighbor, Alice Young, for witchcraft. Hers was the first such execution in New England.1 The magnitude of these events in Thornton's life cannot be understated, for they changed its entire trajectory. Preoccupation with witchcraft also changed the trajectory of early American historical writing. In his famous 1970 essay “Underlying Themes in the Witchcraft of Seventeenth-Century New England,” John Demos quoted the late Harvard professor Perry Miller, “The intellectual history of New England can be written as if no such thing ever happened.” Demos concurred, to a point. He acknowledged that witchcraft “exerted only limited influence” on New England's historical trajectory. Yet, he said, the one set of issues that remained was the roles played by individuals most “directly involved” in the trials. For Demos, these were the accused witches and “their victims,” i.e., people allegedly harmed by the witchcraft. Other historians had given their attention to important members of the clergy.2Scholars have authored many studies of witchcraft and witch-hunting since Demos jump-started academic inquiries into the subject fifty years ago. Yet few have considered the roles of bystanders, those who were not directly involved but who stood by while people made witchcraft accusations against their neighbors. None of these historians have mentioned the Reverend Thomas Thornton in connection with any of the witchcraft cases, yet his presence at and involvement in several instances of witchcraft accusations, suspicions, trials, acquittals, and convictions exceeded most of his contemporaries.3Bystanders are far from passive observers, as studies of the Holocaust have pointed out. Bystanders make choices and help shape the cultural landscape through their societal roles and motivations. Observers acquire “knowledge,” and that knowledge is often shared with others in their circle of contacts.4 Although Thornton was never the center of attention at major events despite his ubiquitous presence, his perspective on these events was unique. Not even the Mathers stood where he did. His lens was first an intimate, familial experience (father and neighbor) that became a professional one (clergyman), with a view over a long window of time and in various locations. Thornton stood, not front and center on the witchcraft stage, but in the wings, a close observer and occasional actor. Historians over the last five decades have demonstrated that witchcraft was a great deal more important than Perry Miller opined. Reconstructing Thornton's experiences in several transatlantic communities gives us a new grasp of how the worldview of people who were not major, known actors influenced the colonial understanding of witchcraft and its connection to sacraments and soteriology.5Thornton devoted the remainder of his long life to opposing the forces of evil that threatened the next generation of visible saints. His subjective understanding of reality might have meant little to history but for the way in which it aligned with the collective beliefs of a small group of men who served the English Commonwealth in Ireland during the Interregnum, and who then came to New England, whether as returnees or first-time migrants, holding strong opinions about the supernatural. The main concerns of Thornton's ministry were converting unbelievers, whether they were wild Irish or heathen Indians or the Commonwealth's children.6 Infant baptism was an issue that consumed him, because those vulnerable souls needed protection.7 When he became a member of Cotton Mather's congregation late in his life, he had the chance to assist the young minister and impress upon him the fragility of children's spiritual lives. It is in the person of Thomas Thornton that one finds ties that bind the first conviction for witchcraft in New England to the last. It is in the person of Thomas Thornton that one finds ways in which the life of one man reflects the much larger New England story of witchcraft.In the spring of 1647 in Windsor, Connecticut, on the little street of Backer Row, Priscilla Thornton and three of her siblings died. Priscilla was a pious girl. More importantly, she was a saved girl, a member of God's Elect whose time on earth had been cut tragically short. As she lay dying, Priscilla reflected on her life and her relationships. Just eleven years old, she was still expected to be in the stage of preparation, in which she learned upright behavior and good moral values.8 Humiliation, the realization of one's unworthiness, and justification, the installation of grace and knowledge of her salvation, came early to Priscilla, thrust upon her by the circumstance of death. She had hoped, even before she became ill, that “some other pious children of her acquaintance might with her keep a day of humiliation together that they might get power against their sinful natures.”9 Priscilla “knew she was made up of all manner of sin,” and she was “troubled with sore temptations and exercises about the state of her own soul,” but as death came closer, she reached some sense of assurance. Her parents were covenanted members of their church, but they could scarcely contain their grief. Priscilla urged her mother to have faith and be happy for her. She told her father, “I have been much troubled by Satan, but I find Christ is too hard for him, and sin, and all!” She died at 3 o'clock on a Sunday afternoon, joyous to be going to Christ.Her story was told in Cotton Mather's appendix to James Janeway's A Token for Children in 1700 and again in Mather's magnum opus on New England history, Magnalia Christi Americana, as an exemplar of piety.10 The morphology of conversion, described in so many tracts and treatises by Puritan theologians, manifested itself in the narrative of her death. Priscilla's story, constructed either by her father or Cotton Mather, has clear markers of preparation, humiliation, justification, and assurance.11 In Mather's hands, Priscilla's death became part of the “ars moriendi” tradition. The tale is more than a conversion or “good death” experience, though. Mather may have been loath to add any reference to witchcraft in her narrative, for when he published it in 1700, the public had little stomach for more witchcraft stories. Yet, Priscilla was one of the first souls caught in a New England battle between God and Satan that involved witchcraft.Nearly fifty years after her death and the execution of Alice Young, the now Reverend Thomas Thornton recounted Priscilla's death to the young Reverend Mather. As her father, Priscilla's education and religious development had been his duty. Her sin could be connected to his failure; her conversion, to his success. The words her father remembered told two stories: the conversion narrative that was important to him and to Mather, and the events of Priscilla's life, including play with her friends that may have been less than pious, along with her fears that she had too close a brush with Satan.12Priscilla's death was linked with witchcraft in stories that circulated in New England. Nathaniel Mather, writing from Dublin to his brother Increase on December 31, 1684, chastised Increase, upon receiving his book, Remarkable Providences, for what he deemed serious omissions. “Why did you not put in the story of Mrs Hibbons witchcrafts & the discovery thereof as also of H Lake's wife of Dorchester whom as I have heard the devill drew in by appearing to her in the likenes & acting the part of a child of hers then lately dead on whom her heart was much set,” he lamented, “as also another of a girl in Connecticut who was judged to dye a reall convert tho shee dyed for the same crime?” Nathaniel Mather's brief passage in the letter to his brother, Increase, suggests that the girl's death was “for the same crime,” meaning that her death was caused by witchcraft in some way, not that she was prosecuted. Nathaniel Mather's letter did not name Priscilla, but it was she, for no other girl was involved in a witchcraft episode in that time or had such a dramatic conversion experience. Nathaniel Mather's memory was of a child and a deathbed conversion, a reference that applies to Priscilla, and he saw her story as significant, calling it “as remarkable for some circumstances as most I have read.”13 Although Thomas Thornton and Cotton Mather never said Priscilla died of witchcraft, Nathaniel Mather remembered her association with it and her deathbed conversion.Gender, property disputes, religious panic, fears of Indian wars and trauma from those wars, mental illness or other psychological issues, epidemics, and failed healings are all recognized factors in witchcraft outbreaks in New England.14 Many New England witchcraft cases involved children as accusers of witches, victims of maleficium and possession, and sometimes as conduits.15 The accusations for which there are records also reveal an emphasis on possession and supernatural phenomenon, such as the appearance of specters. Although Priscilla Thornton fits the profile of some of these young accusers—eleven years old, female, concerned about her soul and her future, and surrounded by other girls, in a time of trauma—those characteristics were not at the time a norm. Only in the latter half of the seventeenth century did the role of the supernatural increase exponentially. Thornton's life helps explain that increase.A tendency developed in the historiography to use the word “victims” to describe the children rather than the innocent women accused and sometimes executed because of these charges. From the point of view of parents, neighbors, and judges, though, children were witches’ victims. Godly mothers, whose election and standing in the community was manifest in their fecundity, especially feared the loss of their children to witches, who were the antithesis of maternal virtuosity.16 Paternal duty as defined in reformed religion, to instruct and protect, and patriarchal authority enshrined in government, in loco parentis, was shaken by the idea that witches were working their maleficium and diabolical possession on children. Witches, they thought, were plotting against New England, and the means to Satan's success rested with his ability to gain control over the next generations.17 The infusion of ordained men who had been abroad during the Interregnum and who fled to New England after the Restoration in 1662, known as the ejected ministers, introduced new ideas about the workings of the supernatural. Thornton straddled these worlds as both a parent and ejected minister.New Englanders saw their children as an extension of God's promise in the covenant with his people. Among the Elect, their children fulfilled the promise of the perseverance of the Saints. Children were, like Priscilla, on the frontlines between God and Satan. Their tender souls could be a like a “brand pluck'd out of the burning,” or lost forever to damnation.18 Priscilla Thornton's father and mother saw it firsthand. Over the course of their lives, concern about the perseverance of the Saints only intensified. Thornton made sure Mather recorded Priscilla's anxiety for the souls of the other children in her circle, but even before then others knew of her experience and recalled her piety.Thomas Thornton's place within four trans-Atlantic communities makes him a significant figure in the history of New England witchcraft. The first was Windsor, where influenza and witchcraft destroyed his neighborhood—a place historian Malcolm Gaskill refers to as “locked in an existential battle between Christ and Antichrist.”19 The second was Ireland, where he committed himself even more fully to the Puritan mission; the third, Yarmouth, where he encountered a wilderness both temporal and spiritual; and the fourth, Cotton Mather's congregation in Boston, where he was present at the death-knell of witchcraft accusations. Priscilla Thornton's death during the first witchcraft outbreak, whose deathbed conversion was recounted so vividly in the aftermath of the Salem trials, was both the preface and the epilogue of a phenomenon that still haunts the American imagination.In 1647, Backer Row in Windsor, Connecticut, was home to a group of early settlers who had left first England and then Massachusetts in search of opportunities both economic and spiritual. Alice (also spelled Alse) and John Young lived next door to Thomas and Anne (Tinker) Thornton on the south side. The Youngs had one child, a daughter, Alice. The Thorntons had five children and one on the way. Then there were Thornton's brothers-in-law, all married to Tinker sisters. Rhoda's husband, John Taylor, lost at sea in 1646, left her twice widowed with four children. Their house lot bordered the Youngs. Mary and her husband, Matthew (or Mathias) Sension, with their children, lived on the Thorntons’ north side. In addition to the families of the Youngs, and the Tinker sisters, the Gibbs family, a widow with four children, lived at the end of the Row. In the small enclave of Backer Row there were at least fifteen or sixteen children under the age of eighteen, with half a dozen in the range from eight to twelve years of age.20Thomas Thornton married Anne Tinker, daughter of a wealthy wool merchant, in London in April 1633. He was from Staines (now Staines-on-Thames), a hotbed of Puritanism.21 She grew up in New Windsor and later lived in Horton, midway between Staines and New Windsor, England. The chiliastic enthusiasm of their region was not that of a typical London suburb.22 The extended Tinker family—the matriarch Mary Merwin Tinker Collins, her son John, her daughters and their husbands, and their children—migrated from the Berkshire and London regions to New England. The Thorntons, Hubbards, and Sensions first settled in Dorchester in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, until they reunited with the rest of the family in Windsor, Connecticut. With each move they were attempting to refine and improve their situations and their souls.Thornton, like his neighbors, was a skilled craftsman. In 1638, he built a factorage with his brother-in-law, John Tinker, an agent for the Winthrop family. A tanner's job was hard physical work. Thornton had a few men who worked with him at the hot and difficult task of “cauleing” hides. His neighbor, Goodman Young, was a joiner or carpenter. Goodman Sensions was a chandler. In addition to practicing their trades, they made ends meet through farming. Thornton was one of a growing number of artisans who was not only literate but conversant in religious ideas. He and his neighbors were God-fearing folk cultivating a wilderness and raising their families. Like his contemporaries in England and New England, Thornton would have seen his occupation, his family life, and current events having a didactic purpose and biblical typology.23 His calling was part of God's plan and his life a lesson.The influenza that swept through the Connecticut River Valley in the spring and summer of 1647 took a substantial toll on Windsor's population. The clerk recorded twenty-seven deaths that year.24 Thornton's family was the hardest hit. Besides Priscilla, he and his wife lost Thomas, Anne, and Samuel. Only their youngest daughter, Mary, and their infant son, Timothy, survived. Timothy may have been born after the epidemic had passed from their neighborhood. Thomas Thornton left no extant record of his thoughts at the time. We have only the story in the Magnalia to tell us how he might have felt. Thomas Thornton died in 1700, the same year the story first appeared in print.The dialogue in the story is precise and Mather's prose indicates some preservation of Thornton's memories. He felt “blessed” to have had Priscilla, and recalled that she was “grave, devout, serious” and “very inquisitive about the matters of eternity.” She was glad “she had such godly parents, but it was her opinion and expression, ‘We trust too much to the prayers of our parents whereas we should pray for our selves.’” She was not merely pious, but struggled against sin. Priscilla was a fighter, not for her earthly life, but for her afterlife. As she cried out to him, “Oh, my Father, I have been too much troubled by Satan,” he was engulfed in her battle as well.25Several notable events coincided with the epidemic. Windsor's minister, Reverend Warham, temporarily left Windsor for Massachusetts, where he was taking part in the on-going Cambridge Synod, wrestling with questions of church discipline.26 Meanwhile, the colony hanged Thornton's neighbor, Alice Young, near Hartford's meeting house on Wednesday, May 26, 1647, after her conviction for witchcraft. Two diarists, Matthew Grant and Governor John Winthrop, noted her death at the time and represent the only remaining records of it from that year. Grant's notation appeared written on the inside cover of a book he kept with sermon notes and town births, marriages, and deaths, and he listed her name and death date. Winthrop, on the other hand, omitted her name and referred to her as “one [blank] of Windsor hanged for a witch.”27 Rev. Thomas Hooker, relieving Rev. Warham, delivered the sermon on June 20 in Windsor. Within two weeks, Hooker was dead. That summer the influenza epidemic spread up the river to William Pynchon's settlement at Springfield, causing many deaths there.28 On August 15, with the fragility of life fresh in everyone's minds, Rev. Warham preached a sermon in Windsor concerning church form and baptism. Two months later the church adopted a new covenant.29While there is no firm evidence about Alice Young's case, there are logical inferences we can draw. The Connecticut statute that defined witchcraft stipulated that when a witch “consulteth with a familliar spiritt” he or she should be put to death. The law required demonstration of intimacy with the devil.30 Her accusers must have said Alice Young had familiarity with the devil. Nathaniel Mather's letter referred to other witchcraft cases, including that of the wife of Henry Lake, executed in Thornton's old home of Dorchester, Massachusetts. Mather also intimated that Lake's story was eerily like that of the Connecticut case, using the phrase “as also” to connect the two stories. The devil had appeared to Alice Lake in the likeness of her own child “lately dead on whom her heart was much set.”31 The reason Priscilla may have wanted to hold a day of humiliation, in which she and her friends would repent of their sins, was that they may have been caught in a mix of circumstances with a suspected witch. Perhaps Alice Young had seen a specter of her own child, an infant whose existence was not recorded for posterity. Whatever had happened, some spectral evidence may have been involved.Historians have long noted the presence of “neighborhood antagonisms” in witchcraft accusations as well as the presence of attacks on or the deaths of children.32 The neighborhood dynamics among the children may have played a part in subsequent events, as is hinted at in Priscilla's narrative. The Youngs’ daughter, Alice, Jr., was Priscilla's age or a little younger.33 In 1647 the widow Katherine Gibbs was raising a family of two adolescent sons, one teenage daughter, and one ten-year-old son. Rhoda Taylor was also raising her children alone. The Gibbs children, the Taylor children, and little Alice Young, Jr. all survived the epidemic.34 The children from two fatherless homes and one from the home of a convicted witch all lived while Thornton's children did not. It might have seemed like God's rebuke to him, who wanted so much to be a righteous and responsible father.35Thornton seems to have distinguished the death of his daughter Priscilla from the deaths of his other children. Priscilla's story was the one Nathaniel Mather had heard, perhaps in Ireland from Thornton himself. Cotton Mather's version focused only on Priscilla. The other children were not mentioned, though they too were presumably victims of the influenza epidemic and, if Young's indictment was connected to the epidemic, witchcraft.36 Perhaps Priscilla, the closest in age to Alice Young's own daughter, got too close to the accused witch, drawn in nearly to the point of going over to what she and her father may have seen as the dark side. If Thornton thought the other children's deaths were caused by witchcraft, it may be that as completely innocent victims there was nothing remarkable about them. Priscilla herself may have been Alice Young's accuser. Her sister, Mary, who survived the epidemic, also seems not to have been part of the group of children for whose souls Priscilla feared. Priscilla, on the other hand, underwent a dramatic conversion. Only at the close of his life would Thornton again see something like what he witnessed at the bedside of his daughter.Nothing is known for certain about where Alice Young came from, but her presence on Backer Row amid so many Tinker sisters and their subsequent removal after her execution suggests she or her husband may have had a connection with the family. John Young had purchased his property from William Hulburd (or Hubbard), the husband of Ellen (nee Tinker). Young appears not have attempted to save his wife, and like other husbands of accused witches, he was able to remain in the community.37Not long after the epidemic and the hanging, Thomas Thornton moved his family to Stratford, Connecticut in what is now Fairfield County. Thornton, whose public service in Windsor seems to have been limited to militia training and three days of jury duty, suddenly became Stratford's deputy to the Connecticut General Court in 1651. Around the same time, John Young also moved there, becoming one of Stratford's original grantees. One by one, the neighbors of Backer Row relocated from Windsor to other parts of Connecticut and Massachusetts. John Young received property along Tanners Brook in Stratford. The Sensions moved first to Wethersfield and then, after witchcraft accusations arose there, to Norwalk. Rhoda Tinker Taylor was the last to move, as she had to wait seven years for her husband to be declared dead. She then married her neighbor Walter Hoyt and they decamped from Backer Row to Norwalk in 1654. That same year, Alice Young, Jr., whose father had left her behind in Windsor, married Simon Beamon of Springfield and moved north with him. She would later be haunted by rumors of witchcraft.38If Thomas Thornton thought he might escape the torments of Windsor by heading south, he was mistaken. In May 1651, Thornton had just settled in town when the General Court ordered, “The Governor, Mr. Cullick and Mr. Clarke, are desired goe down to Stratford to keep Courte upon the tryal of Bassett for her life and if the Governor cannott goe, Mr. Wells is to go in his room.”39 Thornton was elected deputy to the colonial assembly in the year Goody Bassett was hanged as a witch in Stratford. The only surviving references to her case are in a small note in the colony's records and in documents relating to the charges against Elizabeth Knapp for witchcraft. The legal files reveal that one Mrs. Jones, the wife of Fairfield's minister, believed Goody Bassett had, before she died, named Elizabeth Knapp as a witch. Knapp was subsequently tried and executed, and Roger Ludlow asserted to the Rev. John Davenport of New Haven that Knapp named Goodwife Staples as a witch. Staples, whose husband did come to her defense, managed to survive.40Goody Bassett's case could hardly have been incidental to Thornton because she and her husband, Thomas, had been residents of Windsor. They were among the original settlers of the town. Thomas Bassett had come over from England on the ship Christian in 1635, originally settling in Dorchester, Massachusetts, where he first met Thomas Thornton. When members of the Dorchester congregation decided to migrate to Connecticut, the Thorntons, the Bassetts, and the Ludlows were among them. Then in 1650, Bassett, Young, and Thornton among others left Windsor for Stratford. With each move one might have expected the group to grow tighter, but witchcraft and the devil ripped them apart not once, but twice.41The two men whose wives were accused and hanged fared differently. After his wife was executed, Bassett moved out of Stratford to Fairfield, where he remarried and began anew. John Young remained in Stratford, but in 1652 he broke out in a disease that affected his skin and caused his hair and fingernails to fall out. Thomas Thornton witnessed Young's grotesque symptoms and sent a thorough description and medical history to John Winthrop, Jr., who employed Thornton's brother-in-law, John Tinker. Winthrop, Jr., was known for his interest and abilities in medicine and often received such descriptions. On the opposite side of this paper, though, Winthrop wrote of Young, “his wife was hanged for a witch at conecticut.” Thornton's presence at Young's bedside and attempt to help him suggests the two remained on neighborly terms in their new town, but the specter of Alice Young followed them, remembered by Winthrop, Jr., and perhaps the public. If Winthrop answered Thornton, the response is not preserved, but the notation suggests Winthrop deemed Alice Young's execution for witchcraft a salient fact for understanding the letter's contents. Young's strange illness may have been a recurring one, as he was sick and needed assistance for six months before he died, intestate, on April 7, 1661.42In Old England at this time, Cromwell took control of Parliament, and the Protectorate began in 1653. England's Congregationalists began recruiting candidates for the ministry, and Thornton heeded the call.43 In October, 1653, William Hooke, the minister in New Haven, wrote a letter of introduction to Oliver Cromwell for “Goodman Thornton, an honest man bound for Ireland.”44 While he was rather old to begin a career as a minister and lacked the university education held by most New England clergy, there was little to keep him in New England. He and his wife had lost all but two of their children when in Windsor. Their once close-knit Tinker relatives were now scattered. They had added two more to their own family while in Stratford. By 1654, Connecticut had hanged seven witches, several of whom had once belonged to Windsor, and even in his old home of Dorchester, Massachusetts, a witch had been found and executed.45 Elizabeth Godman of New Haven was accused and jailed in May, 1653, and a couple from William Pynchon's settlement in Springfield had been tried and convicted in Boston.46 So with his wife, Anne, and his children in tow, Thomas Thornton, the tanner, left this Puritan experiment to reinvent himself in another. No longer content to stand by as a tanner in the global fight for Christianity, Thornton changed his occupation and his residence, creating a new habitus as an engaged, “active bystander” in the contest between God and Satan.47When the Thorntons arrived in Ireland, England had a revolutionary government and Ireland a Cromwellian invasion. Protestants were becoming free to worship according to conscience, but freedom also brought chaos. Many of those who had fled to New England when King Charles I and Archbishop Laud were openly persecuting religious reformers now went home, excited by the promise of a new Christian Commonwealth. The Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell was attempting yet another English conquest of Ireland and conversion of the intransigent Roman Catholics who populated it.Thornton's time in Ireland is not well-documented, in part because papers relating to the English government of Ireland burned in a fire in 1922. We know for certain that he went to Ireland in late 1653 and he returned to New England in 1661. He appears to have been one of only two New Englanders who was on the Civil List in 1654 as a minister on a state salary. Edmund Weld was the other. Thornton ministered at Sixmilebridge in County Clare, before 1654; at Galbally in Limerick before 1656, where there was a garrison; and at Caherconlish in Limerick in 1657.48Thornton did not become a minister of great importance, but rather was one of many enthusiastic recruits from England's Atlantic settlements. He found himself in Ireland with other New Englanders, including the young Samuel and Nathaniel Mather. Their brother, Increase, joined them in 1658 while he took a Master of Arts degree at Trinity College. As one of several missionaries, the spiritual arm of England's militant campaign, Thornton would have been exposed to contentious debates over infant baptism, theories of the supernatural, and the conversion of people men like himself considered wild and savage.49The decade of the 1650s was a particularly tumultuous one in Ireland, both among the various Protestant sects and between Protestants and the local Catholic population. Most disturbing to the godly ministers who migrated to Ireland as the religious contingent of Cromwell's invasion were the many heretics and “Satanical Spirits and Instruments” that seemed to abound.50 While witchcraft cases were rare, with only two in the years of the Interregnum, the belief in magical forces was strong.51 Irish Protestants, like their English and Scottish counterparts, saw witchcraft more as maleficium than diabolism, but they also believed in demonic possession, tending to view people, not animals or property, as the targets of witchcraft.52 The Protestants in Ireland were especially susceptible to a belief in the supernatural and emphasized the power of supernatural disturbances.Samuel Winter, provost of Dublin's Trinity College, where Increase studied and Samuel and Nathaniel Mather were fellows, was a conservative pastor of an Independent congregation who believed he heard supernatural voices. He was also