Science and the Criminal

by C. Ainsworth Mitchell

But even this test, which was plain proof of imposture, was distorted into evidence against the witches, and Mr. Pacy, the father of one of the children, declared “That possibly the maid might be deceived by a suspicion, that the witch touched her when she did not,” and that she apprehended that the person who had done her this wrong was near.

Additional evidence was afterwards brought to prove other acts of witchcraft by the prisoners. The judge, in giving his direction to the jury, did not attempt to deal with the evidence “lest by so doing he should wrong the evidence on one side or other,” but contented himself with pointing out that there were such creatures as witches, as was shown by the Scriptures and the laws made by all nations against such persons.

The jury retired, and after deliberating for about half an hour, found both prisoners guilty, and the judge sentenced them to be hanged. They were repeatedly urged to make a confession, but were executed without having done so.

Campbell writing of this trial says: “Hale’s motives were most laudable; but he furnishes a memorable instance of the mischiefs originating from superstition. He was afraid of an acquittal or a pardon, lest countenance should be given to a disbelief in witchcraft, which he considered tantamount to a disbelief in Christianity. The following Sunday he wrote a ‘Meditation concerning the mercy of God in preserving us from the malice and power of Evil Angels’ in which he refers with complacency to the trial over which he had presided at Bury St. Edmunds.”

Towards the end of the seventeenth century the belief in witchcraft became less general, and the last trial in this country took place in 1712 at the Hertford Assizes, when the prisoner was convicted but not executed. It was not until 1821, however, that the statute with regard to witchcraft was repealed in Ireland.

After the beginning of the eighteenth century there does not appear to have been any attempt made to prove the use of the powers of witchcraft in poisoning trials, and the evidence as to poisoning gradually became of a more convincing character than it was, for instance, in the series of trials of the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury in 1615 in the Tower of London, to which reference has already been made.

The prisoners in these trials included Anne Turner, Richard Weston, Franklyn, Sir Thomas Elwes (the Lieutenant of the Tower), and the Countess of Somerset.

It was alleged that the Countess of Somerset resented the interference of Sir Thomas Overbury, then a prisoner in the Tower, in her matrimonial schemes, or as Franklyn put it in his evidence: The Countess had told him that Sir Thomas Overbury “would pry so far into their affairs that it would overthrow them all.”

Richard Weston, who had been an apothecary’s man but had afterwards become under-keeper to the Lieutenant of the Tower, was arraigned on the charge that “he did obtain at the Tower of London certain poison of green and yellow colour called rosalgar (knowing the same to be deadly poison), and the same did feloniously and maliciously mingle and compound in a kind of broth which he did deliver to the said Sir T. Overbury with intent to kill and poison.”

He was also accused of giving on other occasions poisons called “white arsenick” and mercury sublimate, which he “put and mingled” in tarts and jellies.