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 childish or absurd than the evidence against her—­as, for instance, that she joyned in killing Henry Mitton because he refused a penny to Old Demdike—­it would not be easy, even from the records of witch trials, to produce.  As regards Alice Nutter, Potts is singularly meagre, and it is to be lamented that the deficiency of information cannot at present be supplied.  Almost the only fact he furnishes us with is, that she died maintaining her innocence.  It would have been most interesting to have had the means of ascertaining how she conducted herself at her trial and after her condemnation; and how she met the iniquitous injustice of her fate, sharpened, as it must have been, by the additional bitterness of the insults and execrations of the blind and infuriated populace at her execution.  It is far from improbable that some of the correspondence now deposited in the family archives in the county hitherto unpublished may ultimately furnish these particulars.