in complexity and in variety. New proofs of guilt were being introduced
as well as new methods of testing the matter. In the second part of
Elizabeth's reign we have but one trial of unusual interest, that at
Warboys in Huntingdonshire. This, we shall see, continued the
elaboration of the witch procedure. It was a case that attracted
probably more notice at the time than any other in the sixteenth
century. The accidental fancy of a child and the pronouncement of a
baffled physician were in this instance the originating causes of the
trouble. One of the children of Sir Robert Throckmorton, head of a
prominent family in Huntingdonshire, was taken ill. It so happened that
a neighbor, by name Alice Samuel, called at the house and the ailing and
nervous child took the notion that the woman was a witch and cried out
against her. "Did you ever see, sayd the child, one more like a witch
then she is; take off her blacke thrumbd cap, for I cannot abide to
looke on her." Her parents apparently thought nothing of this at the
time. When Dr. Barrow, an eminent physician of Cambridge, having treated
the child for two of the diseases of children, and without success,
asked the mother and father if any witchcraft were suspected, he was
answered in the negative. The Throckmortons were by no means quick to
harbor a suspicion. But when two and then three other children in the
family fell ill and began in the same way to designate Mother Samuel as
a witch, the parents were more willing to heed the hint thrown out by
the physician. The suspected woman was forcibly brought by Gilbert
Pickering, an uncle of the children, into their presence. The children
at once fell upon the ground "strangely tormented," and insisted upon
scratching Mother Samuel's hand. Meantime Lady Cromwell[21] visited at
the Throckmorton house, and, after an interview with Alice Samuel,
suffered in her dreams from her till at length she fell ill and died,
something over a year later. This confirmed what had been suspicion. To
detail all the steps taken to prove Mother Samuel guilty is unnecessary.
A degree of caution was used which was remarkable. Henry Pickering, a
relative, and some of his fellow scholars at Cambridge made an
investigation into the case, but decided with the others that the woman
was guilty. Mother Samuel herself laid the whole trouble to the
children's "wantonness." Again and again she was urged by the children
to confess. "Such were the heavenly and div