place in the history of
witchcraft that the Hopkins crusade was one of the expressions of the
intolerant zeal of the Presbyterian party during its control of
Parliament. This notion is largely due to Francis Hutchinson, who wrote
the first history of English witchcraft. Hutchinson was an Anglican
clergyman, but we need not charge him with partisanship in accusing the
Presbyterians. There was no inconsiderable body of evidence to support
his point of view. The idea was developed by Sir Walter Scott in his
_Letters on Demonology_, but it was left to Lecky, in his classic essay
on witchcraft, to put the case against the Presbyterian Parliament in
its most telling form.[99] His interpretation of the facts has found
general acceptance since.

It is not hard to understand how this explanation grew up. At a time
when Hutchinson was making his study, Richard Baxter, the most eminent
Puritan of his time, was still a great name among the defenders of
witchcraft.[100] In his pages Hutchinson read how Puritan divines
accompanied the witch-magistrates on their rounds and how a "reading
parson" was one of their victims. Gaule, who opposed them, he seems to
have counted an Anglican. He clearly put some faith in the lines of
_Hudibras_. Probably, however, none of these points weighed so much with
him as the general fact of coincidence in time between the great witch
persecution and Presbyterian rule. It was hard to escape the conclusion
that these two unusual situations must in some way have been connected.

Neither Hutchinson nor those who followed have called attention to a
point in support of their case which is quite as good proof of their
contention as anything adduced. It was in the eastern counties, where
the Eastern Association had flourished and where Parliament, as well as
the army, found its strongest backing--the counties that stood
consistently against the king--in those counties it was that Hopkins and
Stearne carried on their work.[101]

It may seem needless in the light of these facts to suggest any other
explanation of the witch crusade. Yet the whole truth has not by any
means been told. It has already been noticed that Hutchinson made some
mistakes. Parson Lowes, who was hanged as a witch at the instance of his
dissatisfied parishioners, was not hanged because he was an
Anglican.[102] And the Presbyterian Parliament had not sent down into
Suffolk a commission to hang witches, but to check the indiscriminate
procee