tain that the story of poetic retribution—that the witch-finder was himself swum—is a mere figment.
It may, at first sight, seem curious that Matthew Hopkins should be so prominent and so detested a figure in the annals of witchcraft. There were others who had executed far more than he. The Dominicans, John Nider, James Sprenger, and Heinrich Kramer; Paul Grilland; Nicolas Remy, Henri Boguet, Pierre de Lancre, in France; the Prince-Bishop of Bamberg, Gottfried von Aschhausen; and many other judges had sent larger numbers of witches to the stake and the gallows. But these judges had acted upon the highest authority; they had been thoroughly competent to inquire into these dark businesses of sorcery; their tribunals were established upon the firmest and soundest basis. Hopkins was, so to speak, a mere quack; a mountebank. He had neither the training nor the knowledge to deal with the hideous anarchy of witchcraft; his motive was vilest lust for gains, and this swept both innocent and guilty alike into his net. He desired not the glory of God but the fullness of Mammon. He did not fight against the armies of the devil but shed blood to fat his purse. He was no true man but a charlatan and a deceiver, “a monster of impudence and iniquity,” one who plunged into deep and dangerous waters from no sense of duty, but from an itch for notoriety, a greed for pelf—it was not so much his crusade as his insincerity which made his name stink in men’s nostrils, which causes him to be written down even today as the foulest of foul parasites, an obscene bird of prey of the tribe of Judas and of Cain.
