Thomas VARNEY

                   Source: The Devil In Massachusetts, by Marion L. Starkey: pp 36, 63, 86-7,  92-3, 94-6,99-101, 104, 150, 186, 190-93, 197, 215, 228, 231, 238, 267.

       The girls who first discovered what sport was to be had in the society of Tituba would be hose who lived in the immediate neighborourhood.  Tituba was a slave in the household of the minister Parris.  She was said to be half Carib and half negro  Tituba found ways of easing her lot and one of these was idling with the little girls of the household which soon came to include many of the older girls (most of them teen agers) of the neighborourhood.  She spent much time reminiscing of life in the Barbados and then yielded to the temptation to show the children tricks and spells, fragments of something like voodoo remembered from Barbados.  One of the girls enjoying this thrilling and unacceptable practice was a maidservant to John and Elizabeth Procter named Mary Warren.  With the beginning of the witch hunts in Salem, Tituba became a source of information and readily told the activities of the supposed witches.
       p63: John Procter, who had the prophesying Mary Warren on his hands, was reporting that he had cured her fits by plumping her down at her spinning-wheel and promising her a thrashing if she stirred from it, in or out of possession.  It irriatated him that after he had thus "cured" her, the magistrates had sent for the girl over his protest to testify in court where, as Procter drily remarked, "She must have her fits forsooth."
       p86-7:  John Procter, coming to town Friday morning to pick up his "jade," Mary Warren, whom he had again been forced to let attend an examination, gave voice to some very strong and very public remarks about the girls.  "They should be at the shipping-post" he said.  "If they are let alone we should all be devils and witches."  In his eyes the wrong people were being called to the stand.  If one must have witches forsooth, look for them not among decent women of good reputations but among the obviously bedevilled, the girls themselves.  "Hang them Hang them" shouted honest John Procter.
       You can't say things like that.  Not in public, not in Salem Village of 1692.

       p92-3 On Monday, 28 March a few days after Rebecca Nurse's examination and John Procter's outburst against the girls, the law caught up to John Procter.  Initially it had caught up with his wife only.  "There's Goody Procter" on of the girls had cried in Ingersoll's ordinary. "Old witch  I'll have her hang."  For all John Procter's recent reckless talk about the girls, he and his family held a high place in the esteem of the community.  Accordingly the several witnesses to this crying out responded with unwonted scepticism.  The girl sheepishly came out of her trance.  "It was for sport," she admitted.  Later when Elizabeth Procter was taken anyway, neighbors put the episode on record to present aas testimony for the defence.  But though the magistrates would not honour such testimony, the fact that it had been offered did seem to have a chastening effect on the girls.  When Elizabeth Procter took the stand they eyed her in silence.  But for John Indian, Elizabeth might have left the place without a count against her.  "There is the woman who came in her shift and choked me" he yelled suddenly.  The ice was broken.  The girls began to mutter and moan and to go into the preliminary stages of their mediumistic trance, and then to produce the din that Sewall called "awful."  Elizabeth was sighted on what was now the classic perch for a witch, the beam, and half a dozen said that she had been after them to sign the Book.  "Did you not tell me that your maid had written?" cried little Abigail.  The "maid" was Mary Warren, who significantly was not present.  "Dear child, it is not so," said Elizabeth.  "There is another judgment, dear child."  It waas as if she, the mother and stepmother of John Procter's brood, thought she could reason with one so young and tender.
       Thanks to this diabolic meddlesomeness, the contribution of John Procter to the situation is obscure.  He had come unsummoned to stand by his wife.  At one point, while he was raising his stentorian voice in order to make himself heard above the tumult, young Abigail turned on him with an air of pleased discovery.  "Why he can pinch as well as she" exclaimed Abigail.  Procter's reasoning was like blasphemy to the magistrates.  With them the devil had indeed taken over; this was his hour and the power of darkness; he came in the form of a stern mad logic, a closed circle which admitted no intrusion from the world of objectively observed reality..  Or rather it was a logic which admitted of only one reality, the affliction of these girls and their testimony as to its cause.  The girls had pointed out Procter as "a most dreadful wizard"' he must be put away with the rest.
       And so he was.  Later in the day six accused were ridden away to Boston to await trial in prison there: Sarah Cloyce and her sister Rebecca; the Procter, man and wife; Martha Cory and puzzled little Dorcas Good.  Their estate, however, was not so miserable as that of the three who had gone before them.  They were good friends and good neighbours, and with the exception of the little girl were people of mature experience and character.  They could discuss their common plight together, reason it out, and make plans for bringing Massachusetts officialdom back to its senses.  God would be with them, for they were innocent, and none doubted it about the other.
       Procter, a titan of a man, as commanding of figure as he was downright in manner, had long ago won the respect if the the love of his maidservant.  Her affection, to be sure, did not extend to his present wife.  Mary felt that Elizabeth did not understand her husband, that she was making his life miserable, an observation for which there may have been some grounds in that Elizabeth was currently suffering the first stages of Pregnancy.