POTTS'S DISCOVERY OF WITCHES

INTRODUCTION.

Were not every chapter of the history of the human mind too precious
an inheritance to be willingly relinquished,--for appalling as its
contents may be, the value of the materials it may furnish may be
inestimable,--we might otherwise be tempted to wish that the miserable
record in which the excesses occasioned by the witch mania are
narrated, could be struck out of its pages, and for ever cancelled.
Most assuredly, he, who is content to take the fine exaggeration of
the author of _Hydriotaphia_ as a serious and literal truth, and who
believes with him that "man is a glorious animal," must not go to the
chapter which contains that record for his evidences and proofs. If he
should be in search of materials for humiliation and abasement, he
will find in the history of witchcraft in this country, from the
beginning to the end of the seventeenth century, large and abundant
materials, whether it affects the species or the individual. In truth,
human nature is never seen in worse colours than in that dark and
dismal review. Childhood, without any of its engaging properties,
appears prematurely artful, wicked and cruel[1]; woman, the victim of
a wretched and debasing bigotry, has yet so little of the feminine
adjuncts, that the fountains of our sympathies are almost closed; and
man, tyrannizing over the sex he was bound to protect, in its helpless
destitution and enfeebled decline, seems lost in prejudice and
superstition and only strong in oppression. If we turn from the common
herd to the luminaries of the age, to those whose works are the
landmarks of literature and science, the reference is equally
disappointing;--

"The sun itself is dark
And silent as the moon
Hid in her vacant interlunar cave."

[Footnote 1: Take, as an instance, the children of Mr. Throgmorton, of
Warbois, for bewitching whom, Mother Samuels, her husband, and
daughter, suffered in 1593. No veteran professors "in the art of
ingeniously tormenting" could have administered the question with more
consummate skill than these little incarnate fiends, till the poor old
woman was actually induced, from their confident asseverations and
plausible counterfeiting, to believe at last that she had been a witch
all her life without knowing it. She made a confession, following the
story which they had prompted, on their assurances that it was the
only means to restore them, and then was hanged upon that confession,
to which she adhered on the scaffold. Few tracts present a more vivid
picture of manners than that in which the account of this case of
witchcraft is contained. It is perhaps the rarest of the English
tracts relating to witchcraft, and is entitled "The most strange and
admirable Discoverie of the three Witches of Warboys, arraigned,
convicted, and executed at the last Assizes at Huntingdon, for the
bewitching of the five daughters of Robert Throckmorton, Esquire, and
divers other persons with sundrie Devilish and grievous torments. And
also for the bewitching to Death of the Lady Crumwell, the like hath
not been heard of in this age. London, Printed by the Widdowe Orwin
for Thomas Man and John Winnington, and are to be sold in Paternoster
Rowe at the Signe of the Talbot." 1593, 4to. My copy was Brand's, and
formed Lot 8224 in his Sale Catalogue.]

We find the illustrious author of the Novum Organon sacrificing to
courtly suppleness his philosophic truth, and gravely prescribing the
ingredients for a witches' ointment;[2]--Raleigh, adopting miserable
fallacies at second hand, without subjecting them to the crucible of
his acute and vigorous understanding;[3]--Selden, maintaining that
crimes of the imagination may be punished with death;[4]--The detector
of Vulgar Errors, and the most humane of physicians,[5] giving the
casting weight to the vacillating bigotry of Sir Matthew
Hale;[6]--Hobbes, ever sceptical, penetrating and sagacious, yet here
paralyzed, and shrinking from the subject as if afraid to touch
it;[7]--The adventurous explorer, who sounded the depths and channels
of the "Intellectual System" along all the "wide watered" shores of
antiquity, running after witches to hear them recite the Common Prayer
and the Creed, as a rational test of guilt or innocence;[8]--The
gentle spirit of Dr. Henry More, girding on the armour of persecution,
and rousing itself from a Platonic reverie on the Divine Life, to
assume the hood and cloak of a familiar of the Inquisition;[9]--and
the patient and enquiring Boyle, putting aside for a while his
searches for the grand Magisterium, and listening, as if spell-bound,
with gratified attention to stories of witches at Oxford, and devils
at Mascon.[10]

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POTTS'S DISCOVERY OF WITCHES