142. 'Seeing therefore,' infers Milton, the greatest of England's patriots as well as poets, 'that no man, no synod, no session of men, though called the Church, can judge definitively the sense of Scripture to another man's conscience, which is well known to be a maxim of the Protestant religion; it follows plainly, that he who holds in religion that belief or those opinions which to his conscience and utmost understanding appear with most evidence or probability in the Scripture, though to others he seem erroneous, can no more be justly censured for a heretic than his censurers, who do but the same thing themselves, while they censure him for so doing.... To Protestants therefore, whose common rule and touchstone is the Scripture, nothing can with more conscience, more equity, nothing more Protestantly can be permitted than a free and lawful debate at all times by writing, conference, or disputation of what opinion soever disputable by Scripture.... How many persecutions, then, imprisonments, banishments, penalties, and stripes; how much bloodshed, have the forcers of conscience to answer for—and Protestants rather than Papists!' (A Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes.) The reasons which induced Milton to exclude the Catholics of his day from the general toleration are more intelligible and more plausible, than those of fifty or sixty years since, when the Rev. Sidney Smith published the Letters of Peter Plymley.
143. Displayed in the satire of Hudibras, particularly in Part II. canto 3, Part III. 1, and the notes of Zachary Grey. The author of this amusing political satire has exposed the foibles of the great Puritan party with all the rancour of a partisan.
144. The author of Hudibras, in the interview of the Knight and Sidrophel (William Lilly), enumerates the various practices and uses of astrology and witchcraft in vogue at this time, and employed by Court and Parliament with equal eagerness and emulation. Dr. Zachary Grey, the sympathetic editor of Hudibras, supplies much curious information on the subject in extracts from various old writers. 'The Parliament,' as he states, 'took a sure way to secure all prophecies, prodigies, and almanac-news from stars, &c., in favour of their own side, by appointing a licenser thereof, and strictly forbidding and punishing all such as were not licensed. Their man for this purpose was the famous Booker, an astrologer, fortune-teller, almanac-maker, &c. The words of his license in Rushorth are very remarkable—for mathematics, almanacs, and prognostications. If we may believe Lilly, both he and Booker did conjure and prognosticate well for their friends the Parliament. He tells us, "When he applied for a license for his Merlinus Anglicus Junior (in Ap. 1644), Booker wondered at the book, made many impertinent obliterations, framed many objections, and swore it was not possible to distinguish between a king and a parliament; and at last licensed it according to his own fancy. Lilly delivered it to the printer, who, being an arch-Presbyterian, had five of the ministers to inspect it, who could make nothing of it, but said it might be printed; for in that he meddled not with their Dagon." (Lilly's Life.) Which opposition to Lilly's book arose from a jealousy that he was not then thoroughly in the Parliament's interest—which was true; for he frankly confesses, "that till the year 1645 he was more Cavalier than Roundhead, and so taken notice of; but after that he engaged body and soul in the cause of the Parliament."' (Life.) Lilly was succeeded successively by his assistant Henry Coley, and John Partridge, the well-known object of Swift's satire.
145. Gay's witch complains:
'Straws, laid across, my pace retard.
The horse-shoe's nailed, each threshold's guard.
The stunted broom the wenches hide
For fear that I should up and ride.
They stick with pins my bleeding seat,
And bid me show my secret teat.'
146. The various love-charms, amulets, and spells in the pharmacy of witchcraft are (like the waxen image known, both to the ancient and modern art) equally monstrous and absurd. Of a more natural and pleasing sort was the ἱμὰς ποικίλος, the irresistible charm of Aphrodite. Here—
θελκτήρια πάντα τέτυκτο‧
Ἔνθ᾽ ἔνι μὲν φιλότης, ἐν δ᾽ ἵμερος, ἐν δ᾽ ὀαριστὺς,
Πάρφασις, ἥ τ᾽ ἔκλεψε νόον πύκα περ φρονεόντων.
147. Quoted by Sir W. Scott from a copy of this 'very rare tract' in his possession.
148. Dr. Francis Hutchinson (Historical Essay), referring to the verses of Samuel Butler, says that he had often heard that some persons, 'out of indignation at the barbarity (of the witchfinder), took him and tied his own thumbs and toes, as he used to tie others; and when he was put into the water, he himself swam as they did.' But whether the usual fate upon that event awaited him does not appear. The verses in question are the following:—
'has not he, within a year,
Hang'd threescore of 'em in one shire,
* * * * *
Who after prov'd himself a witch,
And made a rod for his own breech?'
The Knight's Squire on the same occasion reminds his master of the more notorious of the devil's tricks of that and the last age:—
'Did not the devil appear to Martin
Luther in Germany for certain,
And would have gull'd him with a trick
But Mart was too, too politic?
Did he not help the Dutch to purge
At Antwerp their cathedral church?
Sing catches to the saints at Mascon,
And tell them all they came to ask him?
Appear in divers shapes to Kelly,
And speak i' th' nun of Loudun's belly?
Meet with the Parliament's committee
At Woodstock on a pers'nal treaty?
... &c. &c.'
Hudibras, ii. 3.
Chapter IX.
Glanvil's Sadducismus Triumphatus—His Sentiments on Witchcraft and Demonology—Baxter's 'Certainty of the World of Spirits,' &c.—Witch Trial at Bury St. Edmund's by Sir Matthew Hale, 1664—The Evidence adduced in Court—Two Witches hanged—Three hanged at Exeter in 1682—The last Witches judicially executed in England—Uniformity of the Evidence adduced at the Trials—Webster's Attack upon the Witch-Creed in 1677—Witch Trials in England at the end of the Seventeenth Century—French Parliaments vindicate the Diabolic Reality of the Crime—Witchcraft in Sweden.
The bold licentiousness and ill-concealed scepticism of Charles II. and his Court, whose despotic prejudices, however, supported by the zeal of the Church, prosecuted dissenters from a form of religion which maintained 'the right divine of kings to govern wrong,' might be indifferent to the prejudice of witchcraft.