want of even the
shadow of a ground for the charge, had the slightest effect upon the
besotted prejudices of the judge and jury. Acquitted on one
indictment, she is now put on her trial on another; the imputed crime
being her having caused the death of a person, who did not even accuse
her of being accessory to it, nearly eighteen years before, by
witchcraft; the only evidence, true or false, being, that she had been
seen, about the same period, making figures of clay or marl. Her real
offence, it may well be conjectured, was her having rejected the
improper advances of the ill-conditioned young man whose death she was
first indicted for procuring, and to which circumstance the rancour of
his relations, the prosecutors, may evidently be traced. It is
gratifying to know that she had firmness of mind to persist in the
declaration of her innocence to the last.

O 3 _a_. "_Alice Nutter._"] We now come to a person of a different
description from any of those who have preceded as parties accused,
and on whose fate some extraordinary mystery seems to hang. Alice
Nutter was not, like the others, a miserable mendicant, but was a lady
of large possessions, of a respectable family, and with children whose
position appears to have been such as, it might have been expected,
would have afforded her the means of escaping the fate which overtook
her humbler companions.

"I knew her a good woman and well bred,
Of an unquestion'd carriage, well reputed
Amongst her neighbours, reckoned with the best."
_Heywood's Lancashire Witches._

She is described as the wife of Richard Nutter of the Rough Lee, and
mother of Miles Nutter, who were in all likelihood nearly related to
the other Nutters whose descent has been given. The tradition is, that
she was closely connected by relationship or marriage with Eleanor
Nutter, the daughter of Ellis Nutter of Pendle Forest, the grandmother
of Archbishop Tillotson. That she was the victim of a foul and
atrocious conspiracy, in which the movers were some of her own family,
there seems no reason to doubt. The anxiety of her children to induce
her to confess may possibly have originated in no impure or sinister
motive, but it is difficult altogether to dismiss from the mind the
suspicion that her wealth was her great misfortune; and that to secure
it within their grasp her own household were passive, if not active,
agents in her destruction. Any thing more chil