he play are so fully copied from the depositions of the
young Robinson and from the charges preferred against Mary Spencer,
Frances Dickonson, and Margaret Johnson, that a layman would at once
pronounce it a play written entirely to order from the affair of 1634.
Nothing unique in the stories was left out. The pail incident--of course
without its rational explanation--was grafted into the play and put upon
the stage. Indeed, a marriage that afforded the hook upon which to hang
a bundle of indecencies, and the story of a virtuous husband who
discovers his wife to be a witch, were the only added motives of
importance. For our purpose the significance of the play lies of course
in its testimony to the general interest--the people of London were
obviously familiar with the details, even, of the charges--and its
probable reflection of London opinion about the case. Throughout the
five acts there were those who maintained that there were no witches, a
recognition of the existence of such an opinion. Of course in the play
they were all, before the curtain fell, convinced of their error. The
authors, who no doubt catered to public sentiment, were not as earnest
as the divines of their day, but they were almost as superstitious.
Heywood showed himself in another work, _The Hierarchie of the Blessed
Angels_,[31] a sincere believer in witchcraft and backed his belief by
the Warboys case. Probably he had read Scot, but he was not at all the
type of man to set himself against the tide. _The late Lancashire
Witches_ no doubt expressed quite accurately London opinion. It was
written, it will be remembered, before the final outcome of the case
could be foreseen. Perhaps Heywood foresaw it, more probably he was
sailing close to the wind of opinion when he wrote in the epilogue,

... "Perhaps great mercy may,
After just condemnation, give them day
Of longer life."

It is easy in discussing the Lancashire affair to miss a central figure.
Frances Dickonson, Mary Spencer, and the others, could they have known
it, owed their lives in all probability to the intellectual independence
of William Harvey. There is a precious story about Harvey in an old
manuscript letter by an unknown writer, that, if trustworthy, throws a
light on the physician's conduct in the case. The letter seems to have
been written by a justice of the peace in southwestern England about
1685.[32] He had had some experience with witches--we have menti