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Thomas Cooper (1569/70 - 1626 or later). Church of England clergyman and writer on witchcraft.

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 are of real interest. 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 "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". He seems to have kept a spiritual diary of these experiences, apparently intending it for print. When he moved away from Oxford into his parishes, he 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?" 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". 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)" 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.

In this context of Cooper perhaps not getting local support, he mentions 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

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 Biography 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 witchcraft, this means what the existence of witchcraft should impart to the pious reader. As the title page puts it, "with the seuerall Vses thereof to the Church of Christ".

Cooper is, by English standards, an extreme demonologist, fully persuaded of sabbat 'confederacies'. For a book of its kind, Cooper does not cite from prior demonologists 'Exempla' that support his account. [|Guazzo's Compendium Maleficarum], for instance, is structured by Guazzo around 'Doctrina' and 'Exempla'). In his very final chapter he addresses his 'dear Christian' reader, simply saying that he is "not a­shamed to acknowledge, that which thou canst not but discerne; That I haue borrowed most of my Grounds: For the Proofe & Discouerie of the Doctrine of Witch-craft, from the Painefull and profitable Labours of the Worthies of our Times that haue waded before mee heerein, to confirme the Authori­tie thereof, against the Atheisme of these euill dayes." A marginal annotation there does cite "his Maiesties Daemono­logie, Mr. Perkins, Mr. Gif­ford, and others." The 'and others' must have included continental demonologists. "I haue spared the seueral Al­legations, and particular testimonies herein, least the Volume might swell too much", claims Cooper. He also most probably did not want to cite Catholics, for he is ferociuously anti-catholic, and always willing to associate 'popery' with witchcraft. He had very clearly read King James' Demonologie, copying the King's argument against the Weyer-Scot sceptical line that asserted that the old women who confessed to attendance at sabbats were not sufferers from 'melancholy' (mental illness).

But Cooper insists, as demonologists did, on all the purported ceremonies of diabolic pact-making, and analyses every aspect of the relationship between the witch and Satan, including the details of demoniality and the phantom pregnancies suffered by witches after sex with the devil. Where Cooper writes in a more individual fashion, in accordance with his project, he is opening out 'witchcraft' into its larger significance, the "mystery" that he discerns. For instance, Cooper insists that sabbat gatherings of witches took place in churches. Cooper does not bother with any objections about consecrated spaces: the devil being inside churches meeting his witches allows Cooper to escalate into his vehement views of what should and should not be seen in church. In his mind, as witchcraft goes with 'popery', all quasi-Catholic practices in church give the devil his entry. Cooper asserts that during these in-church diabolical sabbats, the witches rotate around the font - Cooper is lining up a furious assault on Catholic views of the efficacy of baptism. He also rages at Anabaptists (those who baptised again) and Familists. But while the only true church is the Anglican church, Cooper regards the believers who worshipped under this true church to be a very poor lot. He rails at the congregations as being less committed to their faith than the witches. In a remarkable passage (cited by Stuart Clark in his magisterial Thinking with Demons), Cooper compares English Christian congregations to their detriment with those who attended diabolic sabbats. He says 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.

Cooper had apparently forgotten about the English martyrs. He writes his way into a series of extreme statements. Whether these positions caused offence or not can't be known. Calvinism did not flatter its followers, innate susceptibility to sin was essential to the doctrine. But Satan appropriating churches for mass sabbat gatherings, because that particular church had too much ritual, ceremony or decoration?

The mystery of witchcraft Cooper reveals to his readers is that, in the end, we are all witches too, morally identifiable with pacted witches. Instead of accepting God's punishment of our sins, English Anglican christians run off to "blessers", but there are no white witches: we are recruiting the help of Satan. So English Christians, he affirms, are nothing else other than "Satan's slaves" (Because "of our own cursed nature, ... we are satan's slaves naturally"). Witchcraft, it seems, is permitted by heaven to reveal to us these important truths, the Calvinistic assertion of the helpless believers' utter depravity.

Influence and citations.

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 that fierce sense of general depravity, the levelling down of "fine" people to the same moral level as the "coarse" witch. 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. Among modern scholarship on the European witchcraft panic, Cooper 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.

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, and 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 various people 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.