cted to meet an attack the force of which
they had to recognize. Hopkins's pamphlet and Stearne's _Confirmation_
were avowedly written to put their authors right in the eyes of a public
which had turned against them.[92] It seems that this opposition had
first shown itself at their home in Essex. A woman who was undergoing
inquisition had found supporters, and, though she was condemned in spite
of their efforts, was at length reprieved.[93] Her friends turned the
tables by indicting Stearne and some forty others of conspiracy, and
apparently succeeded in driving them from the county.[94] In Bury the
forces of the opposition had appealed to Parliament, and the Commission
of Oyer and Terminer, which, it will be noticed, is never mentioned by
the witchfinders, was sent out to limit their activities. In
Huntingdonshire, we have seen how Hopkins roused a protesting clergyman,
John Gaule. If we may judge from the letter he wrote to one of Gaule's
parishioners, Hopkins had by this time met with enough opposition to
know when it was best to keep out of the way. His boldness was assumed
to cover his fear.

But it was in Norfolk that the opposition to the witchfinders reached
culmination. There most pungent "queries" were put to Hopkins through
the judges of assize. He was charged with all those cruelties, which, as
we have seen, he attempts to defend. He was further accused of fleecing
the country for his own profit.[95] Hopkins's answer was that he took
the great sum of twenty shillings a town "to maintaine his companie with
3 horses."[96] That this was untrue is sufficiently proved by the
records of Stowmarket where he received twenty-three pounds and his
traveling expenses. At such a rate for the discoveries, we can hardly
doubt that the two men between them cleared from three hundred to a
thousand pounds, not an untidy sum in that day, when a day's work
brought six pence.

What further action was taken in the matter of the queries "delivered to
the Judges of assize" we do not know. Both Hopkins and Stearne, as we
have seen, went into retirement and set to work to exonerate themselves.
Within the year Hopkins died at his old home in Manningtree. Stearne
says that he died "peaceably, after a long sicknesse of a Consumption."
But tradition soon had it otherwise. Hutchinson says that the story, in
his time, was that Hopkins was finally put to the swimming test himself,
and drowned. According to another tale, which seems to have