and grievous Torments inflicted upon the Bodies of three children of Mr. George Muschamp, late of the County of Northumberland, by Witchcraft, and how miraculously it pleased God to strengthen them and to deliver them; as also the prosecution of the say’d Witches, as by Oaths and their own Confessions will appear, and by the Indictment found by the Jury against one of them at the Sessions of the Peace held at Alnwick, the 24th day of April, 1650.  London, printed by T.H., and are to be sold by Richard Harper at his Shop in Smithfield. 1650,” 4to.  This was evidently a diabolical plot, in which these children were made the puppets, and which was got up to accomplish the destruction of a person of condition, Mrs. Dorothy Swinnow, the wife of Colonel Swinnow, of Chatton, in Northumberland, and from which she had great difficulty in escaping.]

The trial of the Samlesbury witches, Jennet Bierley, Ellen Bierley, and Jane Southworth, forms a curious episode in Potts’s Discoverie.  A Priest or Jesuit, of the name of Thomson, alias Southworth, had tutored the principal evidence, Grace Sowerbuts, a girl of the age of fourteen, but who had not the same instinctive genius for perjury as Jennet Device, to accuse the three persons above mentioned of having bewitched her; “so that,” as the indictment runs, “by means thereof her body wasted and consumed.”  “The chief object,” says Sir Walter Scott, “in this imposture, was doubtless the advantage and promotion of the Catholic cause, as the patient would have been in due time exorcised and the fiend dispossessed, by the same priest who had taught her to counterfeit the fits.  Revenge against the women, who had become proselytes to the Church of England, was probably an additional motive.”  But the imposture broke down, from the inability of the principal witness to support the scheme of deception.  Unsuccessful, however, as it proved, the time was well chosen, the groundwork excellently laid, the evidence industriously got up, and it must ever deserve a prominent place in the history—­a history, how delightful when it shall be written in the spirit of philosophy and with due application of research—­of human fraud and imposture.

We can only speculate, of course, on such an occasion, but perhaps no trial is recorded as having taken place, with the results of which every body, the parties convicted only excepted, was, in all probability, better pleased or satisfied, than at this witch trial at Lancaster in 1612.  The mob would be delighted with a pageant, always acceptable, in the execution of ten witches; and still more, that one of them was of a rank superior to their own;—­the judge had no doubt, in his opinion, avoided each horn of the dilemma—­the abomination mentioned in Scripture—­punishing the innocent or letting the guilty go free—­by tracking guilt with well breathed sagacity, and unravelling imposture with unerring skill;—­a Jesuit had been unkennelled, a spectacle as gratifying to a serious