The Religious World

Abstract

Private William Wheeler could not help himself when it came to mocking Catholic practices. In the winter of 1811, he was billeted in a large household in the Portuguese town of Penamacor. He described the mistress of the household in the most unflattering terms as ‘an old shrivelled hag who has been smoke dried for some sixty winters and would be a fit character for one of the witches in Macbeth’. The women - the elderly mother thus described, her three young adult daughters and four servants — spent every night in a smoke-filled room huddled around a fire scaring themselves by telling ghost and war-time horror stories. ‘They then count their beads, cross themselves and repeat their Avi Maria till their fears are lulled to rest.’ Joining them one night, Wheeler felt unwelcomed and put it down to the women’ religious bigotry: ‘I was a heretic, and they began to consign me, body and soul to the Devil.’ Wheeler decided to exact revenge: he made a ‘Devil’ with the powder from three of his cartridges and placed it, unbeknown to the women, on the hearth. A comrade of Wheeler’ did likewise in another room. Raking the embers of the fire as if to light his pipe, Wheeler ignited the powder: ‘up jumped the party, calling on Jesus, Maria and Joseph and all the Holy saints they could think up.’ From that night on, the fire was Wheeler’.¹