Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 7.djvu/771

 IMPOSTORS

701

IMPOSTORS

she was raised from the ground. The same miracu- lous levitation took place tluring her ecstasies at which time also she was radiant with supernatural light. So universal was the popular veneration, that ladies of the highest rank, when about to be confined, sent to her the cradles or garments prepared for the expected child, that she might bless them. This was done by the Empress Isabel, in 1527, before the birth of Philip II. On the other hand St. Ignatius Loyola had always regarded her with suspicion. Falling dangerously ill in 154.3, Magdalena confessed to a long career of hypocrisy, ascribing most of the marvels to the action of demons by which she was possessed, but maintaining their reality. She was sentenced by the Inquisition, in an auto-da-fe at Cordova, in 1.546, to perpetual imprisonment in a convent of her order, and there she is believed to have ended her days most piously amid marks of the sincerest repentance (see Gorres, "Mystik", V, 168-174; Lea, " Chapters from Relig. Hist, of Spain", 330-335). A large numljer of similar cases have been discussed in consitlerable de- tail by Lea both in his " Chapters " just cited, and also in the fourth volume of his " History of the Inquisition of Spain", but Lea, though indefatigable as a com- piler, is not to be relietl on in the conclusions and in- ferences he draws.

One Italian impostor at this period, who achieved a European reputation, was Joseph Francis Borro or Borri (1627-1695). In consequence of some crime committed in his dissolute youth, he had taken sanc- tuary in a church at Rome. There he pretended to be converted, and to have received from God a mission as a reformer. He had revelations about the Trinity, and declared that God had appointed him to be General- issimo of an army, which in the name of the pope was to exterminate all heretics. He also maintained that the Blessed Virgin was divinely and miraculously conceived, that she was, consequently, of the same nature as her Son and present with Him in the Blessed Eucharist. Borro was arrested by the In- quisition and sentenced in 1661, but he managed to escape and travelled in many parts of Europe. He seems to have lent himself entirely to a career of vulgar fraud, and amongst his other victims he obtained con- siderable sums of money from (iueen Christina of Sweden (this was before her reception into the Catho- lic Church), upon the pretext of making researches to discover the philosopher's stone. Eventually he gravitated back to Rome, was there arrestetl, and died in prison in 1695 (see Cantu, " Eretici d'ltalia", III, 330). It is also hardly to be doubted that in conse- quence of the witch-finding mania which prevailed in both the Protestant and Catholic countries of Europe, during the last half of the sixteenth and the greater part of the seventeenth century, as well as the exag- gerated belief in demoniacal possession current during the same period, the minds of many weak, \'icious, or designing persons were fascinated by the supposed possibilities of intercourse with the devil in a more or less visible shape. How much credit is to be attached to the confessions undoubtetUy made by many of those accused of sorcery, it seems impossible to decide. Neither is it easy to arrive at the real facts in such criminal indictments as that of the priest Louis Gauffridi, burnt for his satanical practices and his immoral relations with the "convulsionnaires" in the Ursuline convent of the Sainte-Baume, near Aachen, in 1611, that of the pretended ecstatiea, Madeleine Bavent, who upon similar charges was put to death with her confessor at Louviers, in 1647, or that of Urbaiu Grandier, the necromancer priest, supposed to have cast a spell over the possessed nuns of Loudun in the time of Cardinal Richelieu. These and similar stories, which have been exploited again and again in such prurient and anti-religious works as Michelet's "La Sorcicre", from an historical point of view still remain shrouded in an almost impenetrable obscurity.

On the other hand few will now venture to identify themselves with that unquestioning acceptance of all kinds of Satanic and demoniacal phenomena which is to be found in the fourth and fifth volumes of Gorres's "Mystik". The dangers of excessive credulity of this kind have been too lamentably brought home to our own generation by the outrageous impostures of "Leo Taxil" to be readily forgotten. At present the tendency of historians is to detect deliberate fraud, not so much perhaps in the sorcerers themselves, as in the pretended intuitions of such " witch-finders " as Matthew Hopkins, who in the years 1645-1646 tor- tured hundreds of miserable victims in East Anglia, under the pretext of finding witch-marks, a procedure which generally ended in their condemnation and death. It is pitiable that the most devout Noncon- formist leaders, men like Baxter and Calamy, re- garded Hopkins as the inspired agent of Heaven in this work.

Towards the close of the seventeenth century, the discovery of the supposed Popish Plot occasioned an epidemic of malicious impostures in England. The persecution of Catholics for more than a hundred years previously had let loose a tribe of spies who, passing from side to side, as fear or interest suggested, scrupled at no form of trickery. In a man like the priest- hunter, Richard Topcliffe (1532-1604), who cruelly tortured Father Southwell, the martyr, in his own house, the note of brutality prevailetl, but that of treachery and fraud was not absent. With Gilbert Gifford (d. 1590), the government agent who betrayed Mary Queen of Scots to her doom, the case was reversed. Not only he, but Robert Bruce (d. 1602), the Scottish spy and swindler, John Cecil (d. 1626), the agent of Burleigh and afterwards the associate of the "Appellant" priests, and several others were piti- able rogues prepared at all times to sell themselves to the highest bidder. A little later w-e have another example of the same type in James Wadsworth (1604- 1656), the son of a fervent convert of the same name, who had become in his later years a priest and Jesuit. James Watlsworth the younger livetl upon the money which he earned by his treacherously acfiuiretl knowl- edge of English Catholics and their secrets. What- ever may be said of James La Cloche, a supposed natural son of Charles II an<l for a while a Jesuit scho- lastic, whose story has recently attracted attention (see Barnes, "The Man of the Ma.sk" and the review, by Andrew Lang, in "The Athen;tum", 26 Dec, 190S), it seems clear that La Cloche and his douljle were both swindlers, though not of the treacherous order. How- ever, the comparative respite accorded to Catholics by the accession of Charles II was also accompanied by a great recrudescence of anti-papal feeling. Two un- principled scoundrels, Israel Tongue (who, though less clearly culpable than his confederate, cannot have acted in good faith) and Titus Oates, a young man whose record was already infamous, concocted a scheme to exploit the anti-popery ferment. Oates, to worm himself into the secrets of the Catholics, pre- tended conversion and offered himself to the Jesuits. He was sent to Valladolid on trial but was soon ex- pelled. Professing repentance he was allowed an- other trial at St-Omer, but expelled a second time. Coming to Tongue in London, the two, in August, 1678, evolved the details of a wildly extravagant plot which the pope and the Jesuits were supposed to have brought to the verge of execution. All the preposter- ous details were greedily swallowed by the English populace, and in the panic which ensued some thirty- five victims. Catholics of position, Jesuits, and others, had their lives sworn away by the grossest perjury. Oates, whom his modern biographer (Seccombe, "Twelve Bad Men", 154) describes as "the bloodiest villain since the world began ", found a host of abettors and imitators, amongst whom Thomas Dangerfield, an adventurer who also personated the Duke of Mon-