perpetuating the impression made by the long-continued phenomena, the trial, and the book. Certain goods and chattels of the executed felons were forfeited to him as lord of the manor. He disdained to keep the money and wished to devote it to public uses. Hence he established an annual sermon at Huntingdon, to be delivered by a fellow of his own college, Queen's of Cambridge. The appointee was to "preache and invaye against the detestable practice, synne, and offence of witchcraft, inchantment, charm, and sorcereye." The sermon was maintained until 1812, but toward the end its burden was turned to the explosion of the old belief.106

And now, when we come to apply what we have observed of the state of educated public opinion and to estimate its presumable effect on the legislators of 1604, who passed the revised statute, we are struck with a fact which all investigators have overlooked or ignored. Two gentlemen were sitting in the House of Commons who had the strongest personal interest in the Warboys case. The Samuels had been hanged, not for tormenting the Throckmorton girls,107 but for bewitching Lady Cromwell to death. As we run our eye down the list of Members of Parliament, it is arrested by two names, Sir Oliver Cromwell and Henry Cromwell, the member for the County of Huntingdon, the other for the borough. These were sons of that Sir Henry whose wife had died (as all believed) from Mother Samuel's arts, and who had founded a sermon in perpetual memory of the murder.

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Both Sir Oliver and Henry Cromwell might therefore be presumed to have an effective knowledge of the case. But we are not left to conjecture. Their uncle, Francis Cromwell, was one of the justices to whom Goody Samuel confessed.108 Mr. Henry Cromwell himself had visited the Throckmorton house with one of Sir Henry's men and had observed two of the girls in their fits.109 This was in 1593, shortly before the actual trial, and after the girls had begun to accuse the Samuels of Lady Cromwell's murder. As for

106 J. H. Gray, Queen's College, 1899, pp. 128-129. 107 That offence, under the Elizabethan statute, was punishable only by imprisonment and the pillory, for none of the girls had died. 109 Sig. NS.

108 Sig. I r°; cf. sig. P 2 vo.

Sir Oliver, his wife had accompanied her mother-in-law on the fatal visit to the Throckmortons, and had been present at her interview with Goody Samuel. That night, Lady Cromwell was "strangly tormented in her sleep, by a cat (as she imagined) which mother Samuel had sent vnto her." Mistress Oliver Cromwell was sleeping in the same bed (her husband being from home), and was awakened by the "strugling and striuing of the Lady . . . and mournfull noise, which shee made speaking to the cat, and to mother Samuel." Mistress Oliver roused her mother-in-law, who told her all about her dream. Lady Cromwell had no more sleep that night, and soon after sickened, as already told.110 We may be sure that when Mr. Oliver Cromwell returned, he was put in full possession of both ladies' experiences. Surely neither Sir Oliver Cromwell nor his brother stood in need of instruction in the witch dogma from James I., or required any royal influence to persuade them to vote for the statute of 1604.

It is worth while to follow the clue a little farther, and to glance at the parliamentary history of the statute. Most writers have been quite innocent of any knowledge that it even had such a history. Yet there it stands in the Lords' and Commons' Journals, and an instructive history it is.

The bill originated in the House of Lords. The first reading took place on March 27, 1604. On the 29th it was read a second time and referred to a committee consisting of six earls, sixteen other peers, and twelve bishops. The committee was to have the most expert advice conceivable, and to that end an imposing array of legal talent, learning, and experience was requested "to attend the Lords" in their deliberations. Here is the list: the Chief Justice of Common Pleas (Anderson), the Chief Baron of the Exchequer (Sir William Peryam), two justices of the King's Bench (Sir Christopher Yelverton and David Williams), Serjeant Croke, the Attorney-General (Coke), and Sir John Tindall, a distinguished ecclesiastical lawyer. Nor was all this a mere flourish. The committee and its eminent counsel took their duties seriously. They rejected the draft that

had been referred to them, and, on the 2d of April, the committee reported a new bill, "framed by the committee." This was brought into the Lords by the Earl of Northumberland. It received certain amendments, and, on May 8th, after the third reading, was passed and sent to the House of Commons. Here, too, there was careful deliberation. On May 11th the bill had its first reading; and on the 26th it was read a second time and referred to a committee of seventeen, including the Recorder of London and two serjeants-at-law (Hobart and Shirley), which was directed to meet on the first of June in the Middle Temple Hall. On the 5th, Sir Thomas Ridgeway, for the committee, reported the bill "with alterations and amendments." On June 7th it came up for the third reading, was passed as amended, and on the 9th was sent up to the Lords.111

This bare statement of recorded facts disposes of the myth that King James was the author or the father of the statute which has so long been associated with his name and fame. Whether the measure was good or bad, whether its results were great or small, the Lords and Commons of England, and not the king, must shoulder the responsibility.112 And it is in complete accord with what we should expect from the caution with which both houses proceeded and the care which their committees took, that the statute, when finally it left the hands of Parliament, was not really a new law at all, but simply a modification and extension of the statute of Elizabeth.

Two names on the Lords' Committee catch the eye immediately, -the Earl of Derby and the Bishop of Lincoln. Ten years before, in 1594, a short time after the witches of Warboys were hanged, Ferdinando, fifth Earl of Derby, had died at Latham after a ten days' illness. The physicians (he had four) ascribed his disease to a surfeit combined with

11 Lords' Journals, 1. 267, 269, 271, 272, 293, 294, 316; Commons' Journals, 1. 204, 207, 227, 232, 234, 236.

112 The object of the law was not to multiply culprits, but to deter men from committing the crime. The idea that very great severity defeats its object did not then obtain among penologists. Take an example of the temper of intelligent men in this regard. In May, 1604, William Clopton writes to Timothy Hutton: "There is an act passed to take away the clergie from stealers of sheep and oxen, which will do much good" (Hutton Correspondence, Surtees Society, 1843, p. 195).

over-exertion. But there were grave suspicions of sorcery. The earl had dreamed strange dreams; he had been 'crossed" by an apparition "with a gastly and threatning countenance." An image of wax was discovered in his bedroom. "A homely Woman, about the age of fifty yeeres, was found mumbling in a corner of his honours Chamber, but what God knoweth.' Three other suspected witches appear in the case at divers times and in sundry manners. The earl himself "cryed out that the Doctors laboured in vaine, because hee was certainely bewitched." In the end,

the opinion seems to have prevailed that he died from natural causes.113 But it would be extraordinary if all the circumstances had not made a profound impression on his younger brother, who succeeded him, and this is the Earl of Derby whom we have noted in the Lords' Committee on the bill. Another person who must also have been deeply affected by these strange happenings was the Bishop of Chester, who attended the dying man. This was Dr. William Chaderton, who was translated to Lincoln in 1594, and he, too, sat in the Lords' Committee.

Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, who reported the second draft from the committee, was a famous student of the occult sciences and was popularly known as "the Wizard Earl." Like Dr. Dee, he believed that his own investigations were free from the taint of diabolism, but, like Dee, he must also have felt convinced that there were others who did traffic with the infernal powers, and that such persons deserved punishment.

Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton, another member of the Lords' Committee, had the reputation of being the most learned of the peers. He was a firm believer in the actuality of communication between mortals and wicked spirits. In his erudite Defensative against the Poyson of Supposed Prophecies, written in 1582 and 1583, he declared that one of the means "whereby the contagion of vnlawfull Prophesies is conueyed into the mindes of mortall men, is conference with damned Spirits or Familiars, as commonly we call them." 114 And he unhesitatingly ascribed the clairvoyance

113 Stow, Chronicle, ed. Howe, 1631, pp. 767-768.

14 Ed. 1620, p. 81.

of cunning men and women to such revelations, — taking as an example their disclosure of the thief in a case of cutting

Let us turn to the Commons' Committee. Here we find several interesting names. Sir Roger Aston had been English resident in Scotland. This may be held to be a twoedged argument, but we do not need it, for there are plenty more. Two of the most notoriously witch-haunted counties in England were Lancaster and Essex. Now, Lancashire was represented on the committee by Sir Richard Molyneux of Sefton. As for Essex, not only was the county member, Sir Francis Barrington, on the committee, but also Sir Robert Wroth, who lived principally at Loughton Hall, in Essex. He was a man of forty-odd when Brian Darcey's great St. Osyth cases were tried and ten witches were hanged at Chelmsford in that county. Other executions at Chelmsford took place in 1579 116 and 1589.17 Giffard, we remember, was an Essex preacher, and his Dialogue, published in 1593 and reissued in 1603, had urged the sharpening of the statute in the precise direction which this parliament took. Wroth had large possessions in Middlesex and sat for that county.118 Now of the twenty-nine years from 1573 to 1601 there were witch-records for thirteen. Serjeant Ho

115 P. 85. Bishop Bancroft and the Earl of Shrewsbury were on the Lords' Committee. The bishop had been the leading spirit in the prosecution of Darrel, and the earl had been present at the trial. But this is no reason why they should have opposed the statute. As we have seen, Bancroft was a prosecutor of exorcists, not a protector of alleged witches. In the Synod called by James (which sat concurrently with Parliament, and broke up on July 9, 1604, two days after Parliament rose) a canon (written by Bancroft) was adopted, forbidding clergymen, without proper license, "to attempt upon any pretence whatsoever, eyther of Possession or Obsession, by fasting, and prayers to cast out any Devill or Devills" (Canon 72, Constitutions and Canons of the Synod of 1603, ed. 1633; cf. J. W. Joyce, England's Sacred Synods, 1853, pp. 620 ff.; Cardwell, Synodalia, 2. 583 ff.). This canon was in no wise inconsistent with the statute, nor can it have been so regarded by the twelve bishops who sat on the Lords' Committee. At all events, James I. showed himself quite as skeptical as Bancroft in cases of alleged possession (see pp. 47 ff., below).

16 Collier, 2 Notes and Queries, 12. 301; Arber, Stationers' Register, 2. 352, 358.

117 Arber, 2. 525; cf. Collier, as above, p. 301.

118 On the Wroth family see a series of papers by Mr. W. C. Waller in the Transactions of the Essex Archæological Society, New Series, 8. 145 ff., 345 ff.; 9. 1 ff. On Sir Robert Wroth (1540-1606) see especially 8. 150 ff. His son Robert (1576– 1614, knighted in 1603) was one of Ben Jonson's patrons (see 8. 156 ff.).