The era of the long parliament was that, perhaps, which witnessed the greatest num ber of executions for witchcraft. Three thousand persons are said to have perished dur ing the continuance of the sittings of that body, by legal executions, independently of summary deaths at the hands' of the mob. Witch-executions, however, were continued with nearly equal frequency long afterward. One noted case occurred in 1664, when the enlightened and just sir Matthew Hale tried and condemned two women, Amy Dunny and Rose Callender, at Bury St. Edmunds, for bewitching children. It is stated that the opinion of the learned sir Thomas Browne, who was accidentally present, had great weight against the prisoners. He declared his belief that the children were truly bewitched, and supported the possibility of such possessions by long and learned argu ments, theological and metaphysical. Yet sir Matthew Hale Was one of the wisest and best men of his trine, and sir Thomas Browne had written an able work in exposition of popular fallacies] Chief-justices North and Holt were the first individuals occupying high places who had at once the good sense and the courage to set their faces against the continuance of this delusion, and to expose the general absurdity of such charges (1694). Summary executions, however, continued for some years to be still common in consequence of confessions extracted after the Hopkins fashion. In 1716,a Mrs. Hicks and her daughter, aged nine, were hanged at Huntingdon for their souls to the devil, and raising a storm by pulling off their stockings and making a lather of :soap! With this crowning atrocity, the catalogue of murders in England closes In Scotland, witchcraft as a crime per se was first made legally by act t ;rased in the reign of Mary (1563). On coming to execute the functions of majesty, James VI. made numerous official investigations into alleged cases of witchcraft, derived a pleasure in questioning old women respecting their dealings with Satan. In 1590, James, it is well known, made a voyage to Denmark to bring home his appointed bride, the princess Anne. Soon after his arrival, a tremendous witch-conspiracy against the happy conclusion of his homeward voyage was -discovered, in which the principal agents appeared to be persons considerably above the vulgar. The king had all the -accused brought before himself for examination, and even superintended the tortures applied to them to induce confession. One of them, Mrs. Agnes Sampson, declared that one great object with Satan and his agents was to destroy the king; that they had held a great witc?i-convention at North Berwick for no other end; and that they bad endeavored to effect their aim on many occasions, and particularly by raising a storm at sea when James came across from Denmark. The witches demanded of the devil -why he bore such hatred to the king, who answered that the king was the greatest enemy be had in the world. On this occasion, 30 persons were executed on the Castle. hill of Edinburgh. These proceedings, no doubt, gave occasion to the famous work on Demonology which James VI. published shortly after. The removal of James to Eng land moderated but did not altogether stop the prosecutions. As the spirit of Puritan ism gained strength, however, they again increased. The general assembly was the body in fault on this occasion, and from this time forward, the clergy were the great witch finders in Scotland. The assembly passed condemnatory acts (1640, 1648, 1644, 1645, 1649), and with every successive act the cases and convictions increased with even a deeper degree of attendant horrors than at any previous time. At a single circuit held at Glasgow, Stirling, and Ayr, in 1659, 17 persons were convicted and burned for this crime. The popular frenzy seems to have exhausted itself by its own virulence in 1661-62. After this period, the dying embers of the delusion only burst out on occa sions here and there into a momentary flame. The last regular execution for the crime is said to have taken place at Dornoch in 1722, when an old woman was condemned by David Ross, sheriff of Caithness. The number of victims in Scotland from first to last has been estimated at upward of 4,000.
In the British colonies of New England the witchcraft mania raged with peculiar intensity. As in Scotland and elsewhere, the clergy were the prime movers. Two cler
gymen have obtained a special and unenviable notoriety for the part they acted in this matter. The one was the rev. Cotton Mather (q.v.), a man who was considered a prodigy of learning and piety, but whose writings and proceedings in regard to the trial and exe cution of witches, of which he was the chief instigator, show a degree of fanaticism, cre dulity, and blind cruelty that is almost incredible. The other, a Samuel Parris, minister of Salem, made use of the popular feeling to gratify his own spite at individuals. At last, in the " Salem tragedy," as it is called, in 1692, the executions, torturings, and imprisonments rose to such a height as to be no longer endurable, a complete revulsion of public feeling took place, and the delusion was broken. For details of New England witch-trials, we must refer to No. 141 of Chambers's Miscellany of Tracts.
Dr. Sprenger, in his Life of Mohammed, computes the entire number of persons who have been burned as witches during the Christian epoch at nine millions.
Throughout the middle ages, it is doubtful if one person could have been found who doubted ale reality of witchcraft; and it was not till the middle of the 16th c. that any one had courage to raise his voice against the enormities which the delusion was occa sioning. The first, probably, to do so was a physician of the name of Weier (De tigiis Damonum, etc.), in Germany, in 1563. He was followed in 1584 by Reginald Scot (q.v.), "a solid and learned person, beyond almost all the English of that age" (Hallam), who demonstrated the absurdity and impossibility of the prevalent notions. The delu sion, however, was still in the ascendant. and found multitudes of defenders, who branded the skeptics as " Sadducees." The most prominent of these was James VI. of Scotland, who, through his treatise on Demonology (1597), and his activity i in the inquisition of cases, is entitled to rank with pope Innocent and the inquisitor Sprenger, as at the same time a chief enemy and chief intelligent of witchcraft At last the world began to awaken from the horrid nightmare; the feelings of the humane began to be shocked by the continued butchery. and the more ntelligent to question, if not the existence of witchcraft, at least the evidence on which the accused were for the most part condemned. Advocates took courage to defend a reputed witch, and judges (like North and Holt in England), to throw cold water on the proceedings; and the frenzy gradually subsided all over Europe. Individual cases occurred later on the con tinent t an in Britain. A man was executed at Wilrzburg, i in 1749, on a charge of sor cery; and a witch was burned at Glarus, in Switzerland, n 1782. Perhaps the latest Instance of a judicial execution for witchcraft occurred in 1793, in the grand duchy of Posen. The laws against witchcraft were formally repealed in England in 1736; in Austria, not till 1766.
The cessation of judicial proceedings, however, did not all at once put an end to outrages on supposed witches. In 1751 an aged female pauper and her husband were killed by a mob near Tring, in Staffordshire; and for the murder, one of the• perpetrators was tried and executed. Not longer ago than 1863, a reputed wizard was drowned in a pond at the village of Hedingliam, in Essex; and it was considered worthy of notice that nearly all the sixty or seventy persons concerned in the outrage were of the small-tradesmen class, none of the agricultural laborers being mixed up in the affair. Besides such violent outbreaks, striking revelations are frequently made in the course of judicial proceedings, how deep-seated and general the dread of witches continues to be throughout the more ignorant strata of European society, especially in rural places; and, concurrent with this, the faith in the skill of certain." wise men" and "wise women" (white witches) to counteract their malicious practices. As recently as March, 1867, a man calling himself Dr. Harris (S. Wales), was committed for trial at the next Radnor shire assizes, for duping various persons, by persuading them that their ailments were caused by their being "witched," and pretending to cure them by giving them written charms to wear. From one man he had extorted £4, from another £6, and so on.