At one of these trials it is said that one of the accusers charged Mr. Willard, a minister of Boston, and that she was sent out of court, and afterwards a report spread that she was mistaken in the person.[66] It is more probable that she intended [John] Willard, who was then in prison, and that it was given out that the audience were mistaken.
At the next adjournment, Aug. 5th, George Burroughs, John Proctor and Elizabeth his wife, John Willard, George Jacobs and Martha Carrier were all found guilty, condemned, and all executed the 19th of August, except Elizabeth Proctor, who escaped by pleading her belly.
Burroughs had preached some years before, but it seems not to acceptance, at Salem village. Afterward he preached at Wells in the Province of Maine. As a specimen of the proceedings in all the trials we shall be a little more particular in relating his.
The indictment was as follows.
Anno Regis et Reginæ, &c. quarto.
Essex ss. The jurors for our sovereign lord and lady the king and queen present, that George Burroughs, late of Falmouth in the province of Massachusetts Bay, clerk, the ninth day of May, in the fourth year of the reign of our sovereign lord and lady William and Mary, by the grace of God of England, Scotland, France and Ireland, king and queen, defenders of the faith, &c. and divers other days and times, as well before as after, certain detestable arts called witchcrafts and sorceries, wickedly and feloniously hath used, practised and exercised, at and within the township of Salem, in the county of Essex aforesaid, in, upon and against one Mary Walcot, of Salem village, in the county of Essex, single woman; by which said wicked arts, the said Mary Walcot, the ninth day of May in the fourth year abovesaid, and divers other days and times as well before as after, was and is tortured, afflicted, pined, consumed, wasted and tormented, against the peace of our sovereign lord and lady the king and queen, and against the form of the statute in that case made and provided. Endorsed Billa vera. Three other bills were found for the like upon other persons, to all which he pleaded not guilty, and put himself upon trial, &c.
The afflicted and confessing witches were first examined, for although, by the advice of the elders, this kind of evidence was not to be deemed infallible; yet it was presumptive, and, with other circumstances, sufficient proof. It would be tedious to recite the whole of this evidence, especially as it was of the same sort with what has been already related in the confessions. The most material circumstance which distinguished him [Burroughs] from the rest, was, that he was to be a king in Satan’s empire.
The other evidence was that being a little man he had performed feats beyond the strength of a giant; particularly that he would take a gun of seven feet barrel behind the lock and hold it out with one hand; that he would take up a barrel of molasses or cider and carry them in a disadvantageous place and posture from a canoe to the shore; and when in his vindication he urged that an Indian which was there held out the gun as he did, the witnesses not seeing or not remembering any Indian, it was supposed it must be the black man or the devil, who, the witnesses swore, looks like an Indian.
Besides this it was sworn that he had treated his wives, having been twice married, very harshly, and would pretend, when he had been absent from home, that he could tell what had been said to them, and that he persuaded them to swear, and to oblige themselves by a writing, which in the printed account of the trial is called “a Covenant,” not to reveal his secrets, and that they had privately complained to the neighbors that their house was haunted by spirits. One of his wife’s brothers also swore that going out after strawberries they rode very softly—slowly, I suppose—two or three miles, when Burroughs went into the bushes, after which they rode back a quick pace, and when they came near home, to their astonishment found him on foot with them, and that he fell to chiding his wife for talking with her brother about him, and said he knew their thoughts, which his brother intimated was more than the Devil knew, but Burroughs replied his god told him.
The prisoner said, in his defence, a man was with him when his brother left him, which was also supposed to be the black man.