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THE DRUMMER OF TEDWORTH
By Scaife, Hazel Lewis, 1872-1939
THERE have been drummers a plenty in
all countries and all ages, but there
surely has never been the equal of the drum-
mer of Tedworth. His was the distinction
to inspire terror the length and breadth of a
kingdom, to set a nation by the ears nay,
even to disturb the peace of Church and
Crown.
When the Cromwellian wars broke out, he
was in his prime, a stout, sturdy Englishman,
suffering, as did his fellows, from the misrule
of the Stuarts, and ready for any desperate
step that might better his fortunes. Volun-
teering, therefore, under the man of blood
and iron, tradition has it that from the first
battle to the last his drum was heard inspir-
ing the revolutionists to mighty deeds of valor.
The conflict at an end, Charles beheaded,
and the Fifth Monarchy men creating chaos
in their noisy efforts to establish the Kingdom
of God on earth, he lapsed into an obscurity
that endured until the Restoration. Then he
reemerged, not as a veteran living at ease on
laurels well won, but as a wandering beggar,
roving from shire to shire in quest of alms,
which he implored to the accompaniment of
fearsome music from his beloved drum.
Thus he journeyed, undisturbed and gain-
ing a sufficient living, until he chanced in the
spring of 1661 to invade the quiet Wiltshire
village of Tedworth. At that time the in-
terests of Tedworth were identical with the
interests of a certain Squire Mompesson, and
he, being a gouty, irritable individual, was
little disposed to have his peace and the
peace of Tedworth disturbed by the drum-
mer's loud bawling and louder drumming.
At his orders rough hands seized the unhappy
wanderer, blows rained upon him, and he
was driven from Tedworth minus his drum.
In vain he begged the wrathful Mompesson
to restore it to him; in vain, with the tears
streaming down his battle-worn, weather-
beaten face, he protested that the drum was
the only friend left to him in all the world;
and in vain he related the happy memories it
held for him. " Go," he was roughly told
"go, and be thankful thou escapest so lightly!"
So go he did, and whither he went nobody
knew, and for the moment nobody cared.
But all Tedworth soon had occasion to
wish that his lamentations had moved the
Squire to pity. Hardly a month later, when
Mompesson had journeyed to the capital to
pay his respects to the King, his family were
aroused in the middle of the night by angry
voices and an incessant banging on the front
door. Windows were tried; entrance was
vehemently demanded. Within, panic reigned
at once. The house was situated in a lonely
spot, and it seemed certain that, having heard
of its master's absence, a band of highway-
men, with whom the countryside abounded,
had planned to turn burglars. The occupants,
consisting as they did of women and children,
could at best make scant resistance; and con-
sequently there was much quaking and trem-
bling, until, finding the bolts and bars too
strong for them, the unwelcome visitors with-
drew.
Unmeasured was Mompesson's wrath when
he returned and learned of the alarm. He
only hoped, he declared, that the villains
would venture back he would give them a
greeting such as had not been known since
the days of the great war. That very night
he had opportunity to make good his boast,
for soon after the household had sought repose
the disturbance broke out anew. Lighting a
lantern, slipping into a dressing-gown, and
snatching up a brace of pistols, the Squire
dashed down-stairs, the noise becoming louder
the nearer he reached the door. Click, clash
the bolts were slipped back, the key was
turned, and, lantern extended, he peered into
the night.
The moment he opened the door all became
still, and nothing but empty darkness met his
eyes. Almost immediately, however, the
knocking began at a second door, to which,
after making the first fast, he hurried, only
to find the same result, and to hear, with
mounting anger, a tumult at yet another
door. Again silence when this was thrown
open. But, stepping outside, as he afterward
told the story, Mompesson became aware
of "a strange and hollow sound in the air."
Forthwith the suspicion entered his mind
that the noises he had heard might be of
supernatural origin. To him, true son of the
seventeenth century, a suspicion of this sort
was tantamount to certainty, and an unreason-
ing alarm filled his soul; an alarm that grew
into deadly fear when, safe in the bed he had
hurriedly sought, a tremendous booming
sound came from the top of the house.
Here, in an upper room, for safe-keeping
and as an interesting relic of the Civil War,
had been placed the beggar's drum, and the
terrible thought occurred to Mompesson:
"Can it be that the drummer is dead, and
that his spirit has returned to torment me?"
A few nights later no room for doubt
seemed left. Instead of the nocturnal shout-
ing and knocking, there began a veritable
concert from the room containing the drum.
This concert, Mompesson informed his friends,
opened with a peculiar "hurling in the air
over the house," and closed with "the beating
of a drum like that at the breaking up of a
guard." The mental torture of the Squire
and his family may be easier imagined than
described. And before long matters grew
much worse, when, becoming emboldened,
the ghostly drummer laid aside his drum to
play practical, and sometimes exceedingly
painful, jokes on the members of the house-
hold.
Curiously enough, his malice was chiefly
directed against Mompesson's children, who
poor little dears had certainly never
worked him any injury. Yet we are told that
for a time "it haunted none particularly but
them." When they were in bed the coverings
were dragged off and thrown on the floor;
there was heard a scratching noise under the
bed as of some animal with iron claws; some-
times they were lifted bodily, "so that six
men could not hold them down," and their
limbs were beaten violently against the bed-
posts. Nor did the unseen and unruly visitant
scruple to plague Mompesson's aged mother,
whose Bible was frequently hidden from her,
and in whose bed ashes, knives, and other
articles were placed.
As time passed marvels multiplied. The
assurance is solemnly given that "chairs
moved of themselves." A board, it is insisted,
rose out of the floor of its own accord and
flung itself violently at a servant. Strange
lights, "like corpse candles," floated about.
The Squire's personal attendant John, "a
stout fellow and of sober conversation," was
one night confronted by a ghastly apparition
in the form of "a great body with two red
and glaring eyes." Frequently, too, when
John was in bed he was treated as were the
children, his coverings removed, his body
struck, etc. But it was noticed that when-
ever he grasped and brandished a sword he
was left in peace. Clearly, the ghost had a
healthy respect for cold steel.
It had less respect for exorcising, which,
of course, was tried, but tried in vain. All
went well as long as the clergyman was on
his knees saying the prescribed prayers by
the bedside of the tormented children, but the
moment he rose a bed staff was thrown at
him and other articles of furniture danced
about so madly that body and limb were en-
dangered.
Mompesson was at his wits' end. Well
might he be! Apart from the injury done
to his family and belongings, his house was
thronged night and day by inquisitive visitors
from all sections of the country. He was
denounced on the one hand as a trickster,
and on the other as a man who must be guilty
of some terrible secret sin, else he would not
thus be vexed. Sermons were preached with
him as the text. Factions were formed,
angrily affirming and denying the super-
natural character of the disturbances. News
of the affair traveled even to the ears of the
King, who dispatched an investigating com-
mission to Mompesson House, where, greatly
to the delight of the unbelieving, nothing
untoward occurred during the commissioners*
visit. But thereafter, as if to make up for
lost time, the most sensational and vexatious
phenomena of the haunting were produced.
Thus matters continued for many months,
until it dawned on Mompesson and his friends
that possibly the case was not one of ghosts
but one of witchcraft. This suspicion rose
from the singular circumstance that voices
in the children's room began, "for a hundred
times together," to cry "A witch! A witch!"
Resolved to put matters to a test, one of the
boldest of a company of spectators suddenly
demanded, "Satan, if the drummer set .thee
to work, give three knocks and no more!"
To which three knocks were distinctly heard,
and afterward, by way of confirmation, five
knocks as requested by another onlooker.
Now began an eager hunt for the once
despised drummer, who was presently found
in jail at Gloucester accused of theft. And
with this discovery word was brought to
Mompesson that the drummer had openly
boasted of having bewitched him. This was
enough for the outraged Squire. There was
in existence an act of King James I. holding
it a felony to "feed, employ, or reward any
evil spirit," and under its provisions he
speedily had his alleged persecutor indicted
as a wizard.
Amid great excitement the aged veteran
was brought from Gloucester to Salisbury to
stand trial. But his spirit remained unbroken.
Instead of confessing, humbly begging mercy,
and promising amends, he undertook to bar-
gain with Mompesson, promising that if the
latter secured his liberty and gave him em-
ployment as a farm hand, he would rid him
of the haunting. Perhaps because he feared
treachery, perhaps because, as he said, he
felt sure the drummer "could do him no good
in any honest way," Mompesson rejected this
ingenuous proposal.
So the drummer was left to his fate, which,
for those days, was most unexpected. A
packed and attentive court room listened to
the tale of the mishaps and misadventures
that had made Mompesson House a national
center of interest; it was proved that the
accused had been intimate with an old vaga-
bond who pretended to possess supernatural
powers; and emphasis was laid on the alleged
fact that he had boasted of having revenged
himself on Mompesson for the confiscation
of his drum. Luckily for him, Mompesson
was not the power in Salisbury that he was in
Tedworth, and the drummer's eloquent de-
fense moved the jury to acquit him and to
send him on his way rejoicing. Thereafter
he was never again heard of in Wiltshire or
in the pages of history, and w T ith his disappear-
ance came an end to the knockings, the corpse
candles, and all the other uncanny phenomena
that had made life a ceaseless nightmare for
the Mompessons.
Such is the astonishing story of the drummer
of Tedworth, still cited by the superstitious
as a capital example of the intermeddling of
superhuman agencies in human affairs, and
still mentioned by the skeptical as one of the
most amusing and most successful hoaxes
on record.
To us of the twentieth century its chief
significance lies in the striking resemblance
between the tribulations of the Mompesson
family and the so-called physical phenomena
of modern spiritism. All who have attended
spiritistic seances are familiar with the in-
visible and perverse ghost, which, for no
apparent reason other than to mystify, causes
furniture to gyrate violently, rings bells, plays
tambourines, levitates the "medium," and
favors the spectators with sundry taps, pinches,
even blows. Precisely thus was it with the
doings at Mompesson House, where many
of the salient phenomena of modern spirit-
ism were anticipated nearly two hundred and
fifty years ago.
The inference is irresistible that a more or
less intimate connection exists between the
disturbances at Tedworth and the triumphs
of latter-day mediumship, and it thus becomes
doubly interesting to examine the evidence for
and against the supernatural origin of the
performances that so perplexed the English-
men of the Restoration. This evidence is
presented in far greater detail than is here
possible, in a curious document written by the
Reverend Joseph Glanvill, a clergyman of
the Church of England and an eye witness of
some of the phenomena. His point of view
is that of an ardent believer in the verity of
witchcraft, and his narrative of the Tedworth
affair finds place in a treatise designed to dis-
comfit those irreligious persons who main-
tained the opposite.* It is therefore evident
that his account of the case is to be regarded
as a piece of special pleading, and as such must
be received with critical caution.
The need for caution is further empha-
sized by the important circumstance that of
all the phenomena described, only those most
susceptible of mundane interpretation were
witnessed by Glanvill or Mompesson. All of
the more extraordinary the great body with
the red and glaring eyes, the levitated chil-
dren, etc. came to the narrator from second
or third or fourth hand sources not always
clearly indicated, and doubtless uneducated
and superstitious persons, such as peasants
or servants, whose fears would lend wings to
their imagination.
Keeping these facts before us, what do we
find? We find that, so far from supporting
the supernatural view, the evidence points to
a systematic course of fraud and deceit carried
out, not by the drummer, not by Mompesson
and Glanvill (as many of that generation were
unkind enough to suggest), not by the Mom-
pesson servants, but by the Mompesson chil-
dren, and particularly by the oldest child, a
girl of ten.
It was about the children that the disturb-
ances centered, it was in their room that the
manifestations ^usually took place, and
what should have served to direct suspicion
to them at once when, in the hope of afford-
ing them relief, their father separated them,
sending the youngest to lodge with a neighbor
and taking the oldest into his own room, it
was remarked that the neighbor's house imme-
diately became the scene of demoniac activity,
as did the Squire's apartment, which had
previously been virtually undisturbed. Here
and now developed a phenomenon that places
little Miss Mompesson on a par with the cele-
brated Fox sisters, for her father's bed cham-
ber was turned into a seance room in which
messages were rapped out very much as mes-
sages have been rapped out ever since the
fateful night in 1848 that saw modern spirit-
ism ushered into the world.
Glanvill's personal testimony, the most
precise and circumstantial in the entire case,
strongly, albeit unwittingly, supports this view
of the affair. It appears that he passed only
one night in the haunted house, and of his
several experiences there is none that cannot be
set down to fraud plus imagination, with the
children the active agents. Witness the fol-
lowing from his story of what he heard and be-
held in the oft-mentioned "children's room":
"At this time it used to haunt the children,
and that as soon as they were laid. They
went to bed the night I was there about eight
of the clock, when a maid servant, coming
down from them, told us that it was come.
. . . Mr. Mompesson and I and a gentleman
that came with me went up. I heard a strange
scratching as I went up the stairs, and when
we came into the room I perceived it was just
behind the bolster of the children's bed and
seemed to be against the tick. It was as loud
a scratching as one with long nails could make
upon a bolster. There were two modest little
girls in the bed, between seven and eight years
old, as I guessed. I saw their hands out of
the clothes, and they could not contribute to
the noise that was behind their heads. They
had been used to it and still * had somebody or
other in the chamber with them, and therefore
seemed not to be much affrighted.
"I, standing at the bed's head, thrust my
hand behind the bolster, directing it to the
place whence the noise seemed to come.
Whereupon the noise ceased there, and was
heard in another part of the bed; but when I
had taken out my hand it returned and was
heard in the same place as before.-^ I had been
told it would imitate noises, and made trial
by scratching several times upon the sheet, as
five, and seven, and ten, which it followed,
and still stopped at my number. I searched
under and behind the bed, turned up the
clothes to the bed cords, grasped the bolster,
sounded the wall behind, and made all the
search that possibly I could, to find if there
were any trick, contrivance, or common cause
of it. The like did my friend, but we could
discover nothing.
"So that I was then verily persuaded, and
am so still, that the noise was made by some
demon or spirit."
Doubtless his countenance betrayed the
receptiveness of his mind, and it is not sur-
prising that the naughty little girls proceeded
to work industriously upon his imagination.
He speaks of having heard under the bed a
panting sound, which, he is certain, caused
"a motion so strong that it shook the room
and windows very sensibly"; and it also
appears that he was induced to believe that
he saw something moving in a "linen bag"
hanging in the room, which bag, on being
emptied, was found to contain nothing ani-
mate. Therefore spirits again ! After bid-
ding the children good night and retiring to
the room set apart for him, he was wakened
from a sound sleep by a tremendous knocking
on his door, and to his terrified inquiry, "In
the name of God, who is it, and what would you
have?" received the not wholly reassuring
reply, "Nothing with you." In the morning,
when he spoke of the incident and re-
marked that he supposed a servant must have
rapped at the wrong door, he learned to his
profound astonishment that "no one of the
house lay that way or had business there-
about." This being so, it could not possibly
have been anything but a ghost.
Thus runs the argument of the super-
stitious clergyman. And all the while, we may
feel tolerably sure, little Miss Mompesson was
chuckling inwardly at the panic into which
she had thrown the reverend gentleman.
If it be objected that no girl of ten could
successfully execute such a sustained impos-
ture, one need only point to the many instances
in which children of equally tender years or
little older have since ventured on similar
mystifications, with even more startling re-
sults. Incredible as it may seem to those
who have not looked into the subject, it is a
fact that there are boys and girls especially
girls who take a morbid delight in playing
pranks that will astound and perplex their
elders. The mere suggestion that Satan or a
discarnate spirit is at the bottom of the mis-
chief will then act as a powerful stimulus to
the elaboration of even more sensational per-
formances, and the result, if detection does
not soon occur, will be a full-fledged "polter-
geist," as the crockery-breaking, furniture-
throwing ghost is technically called.
The singular affair of Hetty Wesley, which
we shall take up next, is a case in point. So,
too, is the history of the Fox sisters, who were
extremely juvenile when they discovered the
possibilities latent in the properly manipu-
lated rap and knock. And the spirits who
so maliciously disturbed the peace of good
old Dr. Phelps in Stratford, Connecticut, a
half century and more ago, unquestionably
owed their being to the nimble wit and abnor-
mal fancy of his two step-children, aged six-
teen and eleven.
It is to be remembered, further, that con-
temporary conditions were exceptionally favor-
able to the success of the Tedworth hoax.
In all likelihood the children had nothing to
do with the first alarm, the alarm that occurred
during Mompesson's absence in London; and
possibly the second was only a rude practical
joke by some village lads who had heard of
the first and wished to put the Squire's courage
to a test. But once the little Mompessons
learned, or suspected, that their father asso-
ciated the noises with the vagrant drummer,
a wide vista of enjoyment would open before
their mischief -loving minds. Entering on a
career of mystification, they would find the
road made easy by the gullibility of those
about them; and the chances are that had they
been caught in flagrante delicto they would
have put in the plea that fraudulent mediums
so frequently offer to-day "An evil spirit
took possession of me." As it was, the super-
stition of the times and doubtless the rats
and shaky timbers of Mompesson House did
their part was their constant and unfailing
support. Everything that happened would
be magnified and distorted by the witnesses,
either at the moment or in retrospect, until
in the end the Rev. Mr. Glanvill, recording
honestly enough what he himself had seen,
could find material for a history of the most
marvelous marvels.
In short, the more closely one examines the
details of the Tedworth mystery, the more
will he find himself in agreement with George
Cruikshank's brutally frank opinion:
"All this seems very strange, about this drummer and his
drum;
But for myself I really think this drumming ghost was all
a hum."
Finish