wn
Confessions will appear, and by the Indictment found by the Jury
against one of them at the Sessions of the Peace held at Alnwick, the
24th day of April, 1650. London, printed by T.H., and are to be sold
by Richard Harper at his Shop in Smithfield. 1650," 4to. This was
evidently a diabolical plot, in which these children were made the
puppets, and which was got up to accomplish the destruction of a
person of condition, Mrs. Dorothy Swinnow, the wife of Colonel
Swinnow, of Chatton, in Northumberland, and from which she had great
difficulty in escaping.]

The trial of the Samlesbury witches, Jennet Bierley, Ellen Bierley,
and Jane Southworth, forms a curious episode in Potts's _Discoverie_.
A Priest or Jesuit, of the name of Thomson, _alias_ Southworth, had
tutored the principal evidence, Grace Sowerbuts, a girl of the age of
fourteen, but who had not the same instinctive genius for perjury as
Jennet Device, to accuse the three persons above mentioned of having
bewitched her; "so that," as the indictment runs, "by means thereof
her body wasted and consumed." "The chief object," says Sir Walter
Scott, "in this imposture, was doubtless the advantage and promotion
of the Catholic cause, as the patient would have been in due time
exorcised and the fiend dispossessed, by the same priest who had
taught her to counterfeit the fits. Revenge against the women, who had
become proselytes to the Church of England, was probably an additional
motive." But the imposture broke down, from the inability of the
principal witness to support the scheme of deception. Unsuccessful,
however, as it proved, the time was well chosen, the groundwork
excellently laid, the evidence industriously got up, and it must ever
deserve a prominent place in the history--a history, how delightful
when it shall be written in the spirit of philosophy and with due
application of research--of human fraud and imposture.

We can only speculate, of course, on such an occasion, but perhaps no
trial is recorded as having taken place, with the results of which
every body, the parties convicted only excepted, was, in all
probability, better pleased or satisfied, than at this witch trial at
Lancaster in 1612. The mob would be delighted with a pageant, always
acceptable, in the execution of ten witches; and still more, that one
of them was of a rank superior to their own;--the judge had no doubt,
in his opinion, avoided each horn of the dilemma--the abomination
mentio