of the
Commonwealth, in 1652, the year before Cromwell assumed the
Dictatorship (1653-1658), there appeared to be a tendency to
return to the old system, and several were executed in different
parts of the country. Six were hanged at Maidstone. 'Some there
were that wished rather they might be burned to ashes, alleging
that it was a received opinion amongst many that the body of a
witch being burned, her blood is thereby prevented from becoming
hereafter hereditary to her progeny in the same evil, while by
hanging it is not; but whether this opinion be erroneous or not,'
the reporter adds, 'I am not to dispute.'

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. But
the princes and despots of former times have seldom been more
careful of the lives than they have been of the liberties, of
their subjects. The formal apology for the reality of that crime
published by Charles II.'s chaplain-in-ordinary, the Rev.
Dr. Joseph Glanvil, against the modern Sadducees (a very
inconsiderable sect) who denied both ghosts and witches, their
well-attested apparitions and acts, has been already noticed.
His philosophic inquiry (so he terms it) into the nature and
operations of witchcraft (_Sadducismus Triumphatus_, Sadduceeism
Vanquished, or 'Considerations about Witchcraft'), was occasioned
by a case that came under the author's personal observation--the
'knockings' of the demon of Tedworth in the house of a Mr.
Mompesson. The Tedworth demon must have been of that sort of
active spirits which has been so obliging of late in enlightening