The True Story vs. Myth of Witchcraft. William Godwin

of fuel provided at a considerable expense, and the number of the fires. By a moderate computation an average number of two hundred annually, making a total of eight thousand, are reckoned to have been burned in the last forty years of the sixteenth century.134

In England, from 1603 to 1680, seventy thousand persons are said to have been executed; and during the fifteen hundred years elapsed since the triumph of the Christian religion, millions are reckoned to have been sacrificed on the bloody altars of the Christian Moloch. An entry in the minutes of the proceedings in the Privy Council for 1608 reveals that even James's ministers began to experience some horror of the consequences of their instructions. And the following free testimony of one of them is truly 'an appalling record:'—'1608.—December 1.—The Earl of Mar declared to the council that some women were taken in Broughton (suburban Edinburgh) as witches, and being put to an assize and convicted, albeit they persevered constant in their denial to the end, yet they were burned quick after such a cruel manner that some of them died in despair, renouncing and blaspheming God; and others half-burned broke out of the fire, and were cast quick in it again till they were burned to the death.'135

      Equally monstrous and degrading were the disclosures in the torture-chambers; and many admitted that they had had children by the devil. The circumstances of the Sabbath, the various rites of the compact, the forms and method of bewitching, the manner of sexual intercourse with the demons—these were the principal staple of the judicial examinations.

      In the southern part of the island witch-hanging or burning proceeded with only less vehemence than in Scotland. One of the most celebrated cases in the earlier half of the seventeenth century (upon which Thomas Shadwell the poet laureate, who, under the name of MacFlecknoe, is immortalised by the satire of Dryden, founded a play) is the story of the Lancashire Witches. This persecution raged at two separate periods; first in 1613, when nineteen prisoners were brought before Sir James Altham and Sir Edward Bromley, Barons of Exchequer. Elizabeth Southern, known as 'Mother Demdike' in the poet laureate's drama, is the leader of the criminals. In 1634 the proceedings were renewed wholly on the evidence of a boy who, it was afterwards ascertained, had been instructed in his part against an old woman named Mother Dickenson. The evidence was of the feeblest sort; nor are its monotonous details worth repetition. Out of some forty persons implicated on both occasions, fortunately the greater number escaped. 'Lancashire Witches,' a term so hateful in its origin, has been long transferred to celebrate the superior charms (of another kind) of the ladies of Lancashire; and the witches' spells are those of natural youth and beauty.

The social position of Sir Thomas Overbury has made his fate notorious. An infamous plot had been invented by the Earl of Rochester (Robert Kerr) and the Countess of Essex to destroy a troublesome obstacle to their contemplated marriage. The practice of 'hellish charms' is only incidental; an episode in the dark mystery. Overbury was too well acquainted with royal secrets (whose disgusting and unnatural kind has been probably correctly conjectured), too important for the keeping of even a private secretary. His ruin was determined by the revenge of the noble lovers and sealed by the fear of the king. At the end of six months he had been gradually destroyed by secret poison in his prison in the Tower (to which for an alleged offence he had been committed) by the agency of Dr. Forman, a famous 'pharmaceutic,' under the auspices of the Earl of Rochester. This Dr. Forman had been previously employed by Lady Essex, a notorious dame d'honneur at James's Court, to bewitch the Earl to an irresistible love for her, an enchantment which required, apparently, no superhuman inducement. A Mrs. Turner, the countess's agent, was associated with this skilful conjuror. They were instructed also to bewitch Lord Essex, lately returned from abroad, in the opposite way—to divert his love from his wife.136

      Two women were executed at Lincoln, in 1618, for bewitching Lord Rosse, eldest son of the Earl of Rutland, and others of the family—Lord Rosse being bewitched to death; also for preventing by diabolic arts the parents from having any more children. Before the Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas and one of the Barons of the Exchequer, it was proved that the witches had effected the death of the noble lord by burying his glove in the ground, and 'as that glove did rot and waste, so did the liver of the said lord rot and waste.' Margaret Flower confessed she had 'two familiar spirits sucking on her, the one white, the other black spotted. The white sucked under her left breast,' &c.

131. A late philosophic writer has ventured to institute a comparison in point of superstition and religious intolerance between Spain and Scotland. The latter country, however, has denied to political what it conceded to priestly government: hence its superior material progress and prosperity.—Buckle's History of Civilisation in England.

132. Sir W. Scott's Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, ix.

133. Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, ix.

      The Scotch trials and tortures, of which the above cases are but one or two out of a hundred similar ones, are perhaps the more extraordinary as being the result of mere superstition: religious or political heresy being seldom an excuse for the punishment and an aggravation of the offence.

134. A larger proportion of victims than even those of the Holy Office during an equal space of time. According to Llorente (Hist. de l'Inquisition) from 1680 to 1781, the latter period of its despotism (which flourished especially under Charles II., himself, as he was convinced, a victim of witch-malice), between 13,000 and 14,000 persons suffered by various punishments: of which number, however, 1,578 were burned alive.

135. The terrestrial and real Fiends seem to have striven to realise on earth and to emulate the 'Tartarus horrificos eructans faucibus æstus' described by the Epicurean philosophic poet (Lucretius, De Rerum Naturâ, iii.).

136. The husband was impracticable; he could not be disenchanted. Conjurations and charms failing, 'the countess was instructed to bring against the Earl of Essex a charge of conjugal incapacity: A commission of reverend prelates of the church was appointed to sit in judgment, over whom the king presided in person; and a jury of matrons was found to give their opinion that the Lady Essex was a maiden.' Divorce was accordingly pronounced, and with all possible haste the king married his favourite to the appellant with great pomp at Court. After the conspirators had been arraigned by the public indignation, a curious incident of the trial, according to a cotemporary report, was, that there being 'showed in court certain pictures of a man and a woman made in lead, and also a mould of brass wherein they were cast; a black scarf also full of white crosses which Mrs. Turner had in her custody; enchanted paps and other pictures (as well as a list of some of the devil's particular names used in conjuration), suddenly was heard a crack from the scaffold, which carried a great fear, tumult, and commotion amongst the spectators and through the hall; every one fearing hurt as if the devil had been present and grown angry to have his workmanship known by such as were not his own scholars' (Narratives of Sorcery and Magic, by Thomas Wright). Whatever may have been the crime or crimes for the knowledge of which Sir Thomas Overbury was doomed, it is significant that for his own safety the king was compelled to break an oath (sworn upon his knees before the judges he had purposely summoned, with an imprecation that God's curse might light upon him and his posterity for ever if he failed to bring the guilty to deserved punishment), and to not only pardon but remunerate his former favourite after he had been solemnly convicted and condemned to a felon's death. The crime, the knowledge of which prevented the appearance of Somerset at the gibbet or the scaffold, has been supposed by some, with scarcely sufficient cause or at least proof, to be the murder by the king of his son Prince Henry. Doubt has been strongly expressed of the implication