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Updated: June 7, 2025
Fool infatuated fool! monster that I was!" cried the witchfinder. "Bertha was your daughter my sister; and I have smitten the mother for the love she bore her child. And he her father he was that villain! Curses on him!" "Peace! Peace! my son!" continued Magdalena, "and curse no more. Nor can I tell thee that it was so.
After thus parleying with himself, Gottlob began to struggle to make his way from the court. "The blessings of the servants of the fiend are bitter curses," said the infatuated witchfinder, on the other hand; "and she has blessed me. God stand by me!" "To the stake! to the stake!" still howled the pitiless, the bloodthirsty crowd.
This stirred the fighting spirit of the vicar of Great Staughton, and he answered the witchfinder in a little book which he published shortly after, and which he dedicated to Colonel Walton of the House of Commons. We shall have occasion in another chapter to note its point of view. In spite of opposition, Hopkins's work in Huntingdonshire prospered.
So great appeared the modesty of each of the soldiers with regard to his appreciation of his own merits as a good Christian so little his confidence in his own powers of holiness to wrestle with the fiend of darkness in the shape which now approached them that they seemed disposed rather humbly to quit the field, than encounter Sir Apollyon in so glorious a contest; when the dim light of the moon revealed the figure, as it came forward, to be that of the witchfinder.
'Did you not send such an Impe to kill my child'? 'Yes, saith she." This sort of thing has been too often done, asserted the virtuous witchfinder. He earnestly did desire that "all Magistrates and Jurors would, a little more than ever they did, examine witnesses about the interrogated confessions." What a cautious, circumspect man was this famous witchfinder!
His reputation, indeed, had gone ahead of him, and the witches were reported to have taken steps in advance to prevent detection. But their efforts were vain. The witchfinder found not less than four or five of the detested creatures, probably more. We know, however, of only one execution, that of a woman who fell under suspicion because she kept a tame frog.
The very fact that he had been charged with witchcraft before would give color to the charge when made in 1645. We have indeed a clue to the motives for this accusation. A parishioner and a neighboring divine afterwards gave it as their opinion that "Mr. Hopkins had afforded them the opportunity. The witchfinder had taken the parson in hand.
In defence he published in 1647 a tract entitled "The Discovery of Witches; in answer to several Queries lately delivered to the Judge of Assize for the County of Norfolk; and now published by Mathew Hopkins, Witchfinder, for the benefit of the whole Kingdom."
The witchfinder had asked him if it did not grieve him to see so many men cast away in a short time, and he answered: "No, he was joyfull to see what power his Impes had." He had, he boasted, a charm to keep him out of gaol and from the gallows. It is too bad that the crazed man's confidence in his charm was misplaced.
But, after his decease, the edict again fell into disuse; and the town of Hammelburg, as if the spirit of Black Claus, the witchfinder, still hovered about its walls, again commenced to assert its odious reputation, and maintain its hideous boast, of having burned more witches than any other town in Germany. It was on a sultry sunny June morning that I stepped on board the Red River steamboat.
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