Thomas Cooper (English clergyman)

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Biography

There is an ODNB life of Thomas Cooper, by Stephen Wright. To summarise briefly, Cooper was London born, attended Westminster School, then Christ Church, Oxford, taking his B.A. in 1590 and M.A. in 1593. He became vicar of Great Budworth in the north of Cheshire, then in 1604 moved to Holy Trinity church, Coventry. Wright infers that there were disagreements in Coventry, for Cooper, complaining of unpaid wages, moved to London in 1610. In London, Cooper wrote busily, trying to establish a support network for himself by dedications to likely patrons and city organisations. But he seems to have been unsuccessful, and lived in poverty, petitioning for unpaid wages, before disappearing from the historical record in 1626.

The ODNB life is very useful for the biographical facts in general. It gives a picture of a clergyman who did not win patronal support, and who perhaps tended to alienate potential backers. Wright's brief biographical account does not have space to cite passages from Cooper's demonological work that explain how he came to be so interested in the subject of witchcraft.

The relevant biographical passages in the first chapter of Cooper's work are of real interest ("Of the Occasions and Scope of this Treatise", p.1). At Oxford, Cooper was drawn to magical practice. This was not unusual, for these were, so to speak, the Doctor Faustus years. Keith Thomas in his Religion and the Decline of Magic refers to it as a "fashionable temptation" and cites many other examples. So Cooper was a young man of his time: "was not my Yonger Studies subject to that tentation? ... Was there not a time when I admired some in the Universitie famoused in that skill?" Cooper does not name this "Chamber-fellow [who] was exceedingly bewitched by these fair shewes, and having gotten divers bookes to that end, was earnest in the pursuit of the glorie that might redound thereby". He continues (p.12) "Did we not communicate our Studies together? was not this skill proposed and canvased in common?" The language here, as Cooper looks back on his early transgression, still faintly echoes the "famous art" to which the Evil Angel encourages Marlowe's Faustus, or Faustus inviting Valdes and Cornelius to "canvass every quiddity" of magic's potential. But then, as Cooper puts it, the Lord armed his unworthy servant against this temptation. Cooper was thereafter all too interested in those who he thought had actually gone ahead and fallen into pact witchcraft after temptation by Satan.

Cooper also writes of how God 'exercised' him (ie. tested him) with "continuall buffetings of Satan" (p.13). He seems to have kept a spiritual diary of these experiences, apparently intending it for print (ibid.). When he moved away from Oxford into his parishes, he then always found himself in the proximity of the devil's followers: "Hath not the Lord since, wherever it hath pleased him to pitch my Tent, even there to follow me with this Tentation, to be assaulted with this pestilent brood and Devillish Generation?" (p.13). Cooper's wavering sense as he writes of this 'temptation ... to be assaulted' expresses his divided impulses.

An ominous word that appears in Cooper is 'confederacy'. Near to Great Budworth, at Northwich, he witnessed "a child afflicated by the power of Sathan and ... though the confederacie of some Witches thereabout" (Sig. A3, [A3v]). Similarly, he asks "Hath not Coventrie been usually haunted by these hellish Sorceresses, where it was confessed by one of them, that no lesse then three-score were of that confedracie? (sic, p.16)" These sound like dangerous moments, and it has to be a reasonable surmise that Cooper, with his convictions and his strong sense of heaven having given him a mission, was in practice a witchfinder. Coventry does not seem to be mentioned in surviving records as having had a witch panic. It might even be inferred that Cooper leaving the town might have been a consequence of local disagreement. He does not mention any hangings - and a man who can talk about his book as him bringing his own faggot to the burning of witches might have boasted of any executions as personal successes (p. 7).

In this context of Cooper perhaps not getting local support, he mentions (p.14) an earlier attempt to write about witchcraft that was actually forestalled. He considered the death of a Lady Hales to have been caused by malific witchcraft. The widower himself (not to be identified with Sir Matthew Hale, who is later) seems to have blocked this plan. It is very hard to get a proper historical perspective on what constituted suitable and appropriate reporting, but Hales might have felt disinclined to have his wife's death spun out into polemic by Cooper.

Writings

Title page

The work for which Cooper is known and which gets cited from is his The Mystery of Witchcraft, 1617. The preface outlines Cooper's credentials, the series of divinely predestined contacts with witchcraft cases that indicated to Cooper that the subject had been chosen for him (see the prior biographical section).

Cooper used the title formula 'The Mystery of ...' in four of his works (eg, The Mysterie of the Holy Government of our Affections in 1619; or The Wonderful Mysterie of Spiritual Growth in 1622). The sense intended seems to be that his work will expound the deeper significance of his subject. In the case of his work about witchcraft, this 'mystery' looks in two directions. Firstly, it means what the existence and new prevalence of witchcraft should impart to the pious reader - as the title page puts it, "with the seuerall Vses thereof to the Church of Christ". In the direction of the widest eschatological context, Cooper is apocalyptic in his beliefs: across the full range of his writings he makes recurrent reference to the struggle against the Antichrist. This will be his conceptual frame.

Unusually for a book of its kind, Cooper does not refer to or re-narrate from prior demonological compilations attested stories of the actions or confessions of witches. (Guazzo's Compendium Maleficarum, for instance, is structured by Guazzo around 'Doctrina' and 'Exempla'). In his closing chapter Cooper addresses his 'dear Christian' reader, simply saying that he is "not a­shamed to acknowledge, that which thou canst not but discerne; That I have borrowed most of my Grounds: For the Proofe & Discoverie of the Doctrine of Witch-craft, from the Painefull and profitable Labours of the Worthies of our Times that have waded before mee heerein, to confirme the Authori­tie thereof, against the Atheisme of these evill dayes" (p.363). A marginal annotation at that point does cite "his Maiesties Daemono­logie, Mr. Perkins, Mr. Gif­ford, and others." The 'and others' must have included continental demonologists. "I have spared the several Al­legations, and particular testimonies herein, least the Volume might swell too much", claims Cooper (p.364). He also most probably did not want to cite Catholic authors, for he was ferociously anti-catholic, and always willing to associate 'popery' with witchcraft. That Cooper largely eschews citation of earlier demonologists, and nowhere gives any specifics of particular witchcraft accusations (with dates, names, and places given), gives a conceptual emphasis to his writing. He opens out 'witchcraft' into its larger significance, the "mystery" that he discerns.

A focal point, one where Cooper can be seen to be making an urgent warning via witchcraft about the role of Antichrist, comes when witches' sabbats are described. He is a thoroughgoing demonologist, fully persuaded of sabbat 'confederacies'. When it comes to the sabbat, the generally unspecific Cooper gives thorough detail of all the purported ceremonies. Especially revealing is Cooper's insistence that sabbat gatherings of witches take place in churches (Chapter 6, p.90). Cooper is not concerned with any objections about consecrated ground: the devil inside churches meeting his witches allows Cooper to escalate into a vision of satanic subversion of the pulpit, and berate a sinfully supine congregation who have allowed this great advance for Antichrist to happen.

This disturbing vision of the church quite subverted, with the devil in the pulpit, is central to his polemic: "First, Satan blasphemously occupy­ing, the Place whence the holy Oracles are delivered" (p.90). There is a marginal note justifying this diabolical intrusion as something that actually was happening via reference to King James' own Daemonologie . Perhaps Cooper was also thinking of the woodcut of this usurpation in Newes from Scotland (1591, written by James Carmichael?). What is clear is that Cooper believed that there was an ongoing process of subversion: "Witch-craft became an especiall proppe of Antichrists king­dome" (p. 194). Witches are the new forces of Antichrist, who is establishing a counter-church of his own: "As, For the first, As Antichrist, intruded into the seate of the Lord, both sitting in the Temple of the Lord, and raigning in the consciences of men, and so exalting himselfe in voluntary worship above all that is called God: So was hee much furthered heereun­to, by this Art of Negromancie" (p. 195). This has happened because Christian congregations have themselves made an unknowing pact with Satan: they have admitted Satan's assistance, and now he is able to occupy pulpits in their churches.

The mystery of witchcraft which Cooper reveals to his readers is that, in the final consideration, they have all become morally identifiable with pacted witches. Instead of accepting God's punishment of our sins, Anglican Christians foolishly run off to "blessers": "OF the detection and punishment of Witches: That they are to bee punished with death, especially the Blesser and good Witch, as they terme her", p. 270. It was a standard Anglican view that there is no innocent magic: when people consult "blessers", they are recruiting the assistance of Satan. Our innate propensity for sin, Cooper tells his readers, reveals that we are nothing else other than Satan's slaves (he invites consideration of how by "our own cursed nature ... wee are Sathans slaves naturally", p.31). He returns to this point: "Doth not this convince the A­theist that dreames of Generall Grace; All shall be saved; seeing by this Doctrine and Practise of Witch-craft: It is now apparant, That not onely naturally we are the bondslaves of Satan, but that many purposely yeelde up themselves to his cursed will, re­nounce their salvation, to become his slaves, binde themselues to eter­nall damnation, and so are made oft­times fearefull spectacles of the Di­vine vengeance, being carried away by the divell, and haled violently to destruction?" (p. 321). By our natural condition, he is saying, we are enslaved to sin and Satan, then by turning to apparently harmless 'blessing witches' we enter into a non-overt version of a witch's contract with Satan.

Cooper would most probably have regarded himself as a cleric who did his duty to his readers by alerting them to extreme moral danger. But his fascination with diabolic subversion of what should be the true church runs the danger of inventing heterodoxies to defend orthodoxy. As another example, he also asserts that during these in-church diabolical sabbats, the witches circle round the font - he is lining up a furious assault on Catholic views of the efficacy of infant baptism for salvation (p.91), and he rages at Anabaptists (those who baptised again) and Familists. But while the only true church is the Anglican church, Cooper depicts the believers who worshipped in this true church as having facilitated and tolerated diabolical intrusion into their place of worship. They have consulted witches themselves, and as witchcraft for Cooper is always associated with 'popery', their toleration of any quasi-Catholic practices in church also help give the devil his entry. The devil will then admit a congregation that will worship him. In a remarkable passage, Cooper rails at those who attended England's churches for Christian worship as being less committed to their true faith than the witches are to their misplaced faith (p.96, cited and discussed by Stuart Clark in his magisterial Thinking with Demons, p.142.). Comparing English Christian congregations to their detriment with those who attended diabolic sabbats, Cooper asserts that the willingness of witches to make a pact in blood with the devil, and re-affirm that pact by feeding their devils or familiars with their blood, contrasts with the unwillingness of purportedly true Christians to shed their blood for Christ.

The Mystery of Witchcraft is a turbulent work, that in places reminds us that the author had, as a young man, been drawn to magical practice. That old subversiveness has gone into this agitated account of the diabolic subversion of the Anglican church and its believers.

Influence and citations

Perhaps surprisingly, Cooper's book does not seem to have caused scandal to the church, but it is evident that his church career stalled. His witch hunting and vehemence of opinion may have had something to do with that. The work was perhaps not very widely read, for The Mystery of Witchcraft was re-issued in 1622 as Sathan transformed into an angell of light. The body text itself has not been reset, but a new dedication to the "worthy Governour of the East In­dian Merchants" replaces that to "the Mayor and Corporation of the Ancient Citie of CHESTER" in the 1617 volume. This looks as though unsold copies of Nicholas Okes' print run were left over in such numbers five years later that an attempt to shift a few more copies was made via the new title. There was evidently a lukewarm response to Cooper's urgent warnings. Appearing as it did in 1617, The Mystery of Witchcraft might have come into Thomas Dekker's hands when he set out to depict Elizabeth Sawyer in The Witch of Edmonton (1621). It isn't a matter of verbal indebtedness, but Cooper's fierce sense of general depravity has something in common with the levelling down of "fine" people to the same moral level as the "coarse" witch in the play. If Cooper had caught the attention of members of the play writing team, the title page of the murder pamphlet of 1620, The Cry and Revenge of Blood may at some level underlie Frank Thorney's devil-impelled murder in the same drama. In the modern scholarship on the European witchcraft panic, Thomas Cooper's work gets cited by Stuart Clark, Keith Thomas, James Sharpe, Alan Macfarlane - all the usual scholarly authorities, though these serious historians use his writings illustratively, rather than trying to characterise the author behind the writings. Similarly, literary historians like Paul Kocher and Moody Prior quote from Cooper without getting involved in wider analysis of the text.

The Cry and Revenge of Blood (1620)

The narrative given by The Cry and Revenge of Blood is quickly conveyed in the horrors depicted on the title page, but overrun with polemic in Cooper's wordy pamphlet. In brief, a rival landowner tricked members of a local family out of their inheritance. The first to threaten legal action to reclaim their just inheritance was murdered by henchmen of the expropriator. Subsequently another two family members, a brother and sister, set off on a legal challege, and were murdered in their turn. All the bodies were staked down at the bottom of the village pond. But after some years, a local farmer was, at least as Cooper tells it, taken with a strange compulsion to drain and clean the pond. Cooper regards this unaccountable expense and trouble as providentially inspired. Skeletal cadavres were found, and the older brother's skull was identified by the absence of two teeth his mother recelled him losing in an accident. Providence also intervened to make one of the killers utterly give himself away. It seems he wandered off with the incriminating skull, and, thinking to invalidate the identification, asked first a barber and then a blacksmith to help him to knock out further teeth. A quicker-witted local woman directly challenged him as knowing all about the murder, and so the reason for the multiple disappearances comes finally to light along with the identification of the murderers.

References

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