light and some severe, but the fact remains that less than half a hundred persons suffered on the gallows for this offence, and it must be remembered that in those days hanging was the penalty for delinquencies which to-day would be considered sufficiently to be met with a petty fine or even a magisterial caution.
It is yet more remarkable that during the reign of Charles I, that is to say whilst the King was in full enjoyment of his royal prerogative, which may fairly be said to have been first seriously hampered at the outbreak of the Great Rebellion in 1642, there were until this date but seven recorded executions for witchcraft, and of these two rest upon very doubtful evidence. In the case of the second Lancashire prosecutions, 1633–34, when seventeen persons were tried and condemned, the King reprieved all who lay under sentence and they were shortly released from prison. The immediate change which took place in 1642 and the Parliamentary prosecutions which raged far and wide during the next eighteen years are certainly amazing. Without going so far as entirely to accept the figures of Dr. Zachary Grey, who in his notes upon Hudidras says that under the Long Parliament “betwixt three and four thousands” were hanged, we are bound most certainly to affirm that whilst Cromwell had the upper hand the number of executions was far greater in England than ever before or ever since.[1]
- ↑ Hudibras, II, Canto iii, 143–4, Dr. Grey’s note is: “Dr. Meric Casaubon in his Preface to Dr. Dee’s Book of Spirits observes: That nine hundred Men and Women suffer’d in Lorain for Witchcraft in the Compass of a few Years: And Ludovicus Paramo, that the Inquisition, within the space of one hundred and fifty years, has burnt thirty thousand Witches. Baker’s History of the Inquisition, p. 186. But our enthusiasts much exceeded both. Mr. Ady says that in Scotland some thousands were burnt in those Times. (Dr. Hutchinson, p. 38.) I have somewhere seen an Account of betwixt three and four thousands, that suffer’d in the King’s Dominions from the
