Born: Unknown, Ireland
Died: 16 November 1688
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Goody or Goodwife Glover
This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Niav Gallagher. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Glover, Goodwife (‘Goody’; ‘Ann’) (d. 1688), last person executed in Boston as a witch, was born in Ireland in the middle decades of the seventeenth century. Glover was a Catholic and a native Irish speaker, likely with a smattering of English. By the time of her trial for witchcraft in 1688, she was widowed with at least one child and had been living in Boston for some time. Glover was accused of witchcraft in the summer of 1688, and was tried, found guilty and hanged on 16 November. There are no extant records of Glover’s life before 1688 and no official records of the trial survive; most biographical information about Glover derives from the detailed account of her trial recorded in Cotton Mather’s Memorable providences, relating to witchcrafts and possessions, published in 1689.
Mather’s account is one of four contemporary or near-contemporary sources relating to Glover’s trial, the others being Joshua Moody’s letter to Increase Mather (4 Oct. 1688), a diary entry by judge Samuel Sewall (16 Nov. 1688) and Robert Calef’s More wonders of the invisible world (1700). None of these sources provides any documentary evidence for Glover’s life before the events of 1688, which has given rise to a number of unverifiable assertions that say more about the authors and their agendas than they do about Glover. Mather’s Memorable providences provides the most detail for Glover’s life, although his focus was largely on the supernatural aspects of the accusations against her.
Immediately on being alerted by Joshua Moody to the case of alleged witchcraft in October 1688, Mather travelled to Boston, where he was allowed to interview Glover. According to Mather, the children of John Goodwin, a mason, were bewitched following an encounter between Martha Goodwin, aged thirteen, and Glover’s daughter (probably named Mary), who Martha accused of stealing linen. When Glover came to her daughter’s defence using ‘very bad language’, Martha ‘immediately … became variously indisposed in her health, and visited with strange fits, beyond those of epilepsie [sic] or catalepsie [sic] or those that they call the disease of astonishment’ (Mather, 3). Within days the ailment had spread to her sister and two of her brothers. When they were examined by Dr Thomas Oakes, he concluded that ‘nothing but an hellish witchcraft could be the original of these maladies’ (ibid.). Initially questioned by magistrates, Glover and her daughter were subsequently imprisoned and questioned more closely. Though the case against Glover centred upon the suffering of the children, other factors contributed heavily to the suspicion that she was a witch. During her trial she spoke only in Irish, though Mather claimed (if with some prevarication) that she also understood and had spoken some English when he interviewed her in prison. The court appointed two men as interpreters, inserting yet another layer between Glover and her accusers. Glover’s inability to answer questions directly contributed to her eventual condemnation, as did cultural and religious differences. One of the tests for witchcraft was recitation of the Lord’s prayer; if the alleged witch failed to recite the prayer perfectly it was taken as a sign they were in league with the devil. When Glover was unable to pass the test (which she was required to complete in English), she was examined by six court-appointed physicians and ‘owned herself a Roman Catholick and could recite the Pater noster in Latin very readily’ (ibid., 9). Even with this, however, Glover struggled to recite the prayer perfectly in Latin; Mather noted that ‘there was one clause or two always too hard for her’ – probably the final lines of the prayer normally reserved for the priest in the Catholic mass.
Mather’s account noted that Glover had a ‘miserable old husband, [who] before he died, had sometimes complained of her that she was undoubtedly a witch’ (ibid., 3). Although there are no official court records extant for Glover’s trial, her sentence was recorded in judge Samuel Sewall’s diary on 16 November 1688. A final, near-contemporaneous account comes from Boston merchant Robert Calef, who claimed that he had read notes of the trial, taken for the use of the jury. Calef described Glover as a ‘despised, crazy, ill-conditioned woman, an Irish Roman Catholic’, yet noted that though her answers suggested that she was distracted or perhaps mentally unwell, the evidence against her was wholly deficient (Calef, 299).
Towards the end of the trial, a second accusation of witchcraft was levelled at Glover. According to Goody Hughes, a neighbour named Howen had called Hughes to her deathbed about six years previously, where she accused Glover of causing her imminent death through witchcraft. Hughes also accused Glover of using witchcraft against her son. Mather alleged that on the day of her execution, Glover declared that the Goodwin children would never be free of their enchantments, as she was not the only one involved in their suffering; Mather himself believed that Glover was in league with several others. She was then hanged, although Mather gave no details of the execution, and the place of her burial is unknown.
Glover’s trial and death had a significant impact on the infamous witchcraft trials that took place in nearby Salem in 1692. Mather’s book was widely read and many of the manifestations he described in the Goodwin children were recreated in Salem: random cries, neck and back pains, protruding tongues, flapping arms and self-harm. Although not directly involved in the trials owing to ill health, Mather wrote to one of the magistrates, John Richards, offering advice, and he also sent a report recommending caution in the use of spectral evidence (as had been used in Boston) and advising the use of ‘witch tests’, such as reciting the Lord’s prayer. Sewall, too, drew on his experiences in Boston when he was appointed as one of the nine judges overseeing the Salem trials. He later regretted his role and set aside a day each year after 1697 on which he fasted and prayed for forgiveness.
In more recent years, Glover has become a cypher for several agendas. In the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century version of her life, ‘Ann’ Glover and her husband were exiled from Ireland in the time of Oliver Cromwell and sold into slavery or indentured servitude in Barbados, where Glover’s husband was killed after refusing to renounce his Catholic faith. Glover was then removed to Boston where she was persecuted for her race, creed and gender. The origin of this story appears to lie with Fr James Fitton who, in his Sketches of the establishment of the church in New England (1872), wrote that Glover was ‘probably one of the unfortunate women whom English barbarity tore from their homes in Ireland, to sell as slaves in America’ (Fitton, 55). While several subsequent authors repeated his assertion, it was popularised by Harold Dijon in 1905. More recent scholarship has demonstrated that Dijon manufactured evidence to ‘embellish the narrative and transform Goodwife Glover into the first Catholic martyr in Massachusetts’ (Hogan, ‘The myth’), while he also fabricated the assertions that her name was ‘Ann’, that she was sold into slavery in Barbados and that her husband was scoured to death. None of these assertions can be proved and several can be debunked.
Subsequent accounts have leaned heavily on Dijon, adding details to suit particular narratives, culminating in the erection of a plaque in Boston in 1988. The result of a campaign by priest and historian Vincent A. Lapomarda, SJ, the plaque commemorates Glover as having been hanged for refusing to renounce her faith and refers to her as the first Catholic martyr in Massachusetts (the plaque originally hung in Our Lady of Victories shrine, Boston, but now hangs on Hanover Street in the city’s North End district). While early twentieth-century accounts of Glover’s life sought to establish her as a Catholic martyr, some twenty-first century accounts have focused on the fabrication that she was a former slave – for which there is no evidence – in attempts to support the myth that there were many Irish slaves in the Caribbean during the seventeenth century. There is also no extant evidence that Glover was an indentured servant, though this would have been a common method of emigration among the lower classes during the period.
One piece of evidence emerged in the early twentieth century, however, that almost certainly confirms that Glover’s daughter was named Mary. Glover and her daughter were both imprisoned following Martha Goodwin’s accusations, and records held in Massachusetts archives, published in a 1920 article, show that ‘Mary Glover, the Irish Catholic Witch’ was held in Boston jail in late 1689 and early 1690. Since Sewall recorded Glover’s execution in 1688, this was, most probably, her daughter, held there since October 1688. There is no record of Mary Glover after 1690.
To mark the tercentenary of Glover’s execution, Boston city council declared 16 November 1988 ‘Goody Glover Day’; she is the only person accused and executed as a witch to be commemorated in such a way.