due gospel subjection!" returned the minister.

"Oh, yes, rejoined the Governor smiling; but I wish you had a wife like
Lady Mary, and would try it on her! I think we should hear something
breaking."

But when Mistress Ann Putnam and others began "to cry out" against Lady
Mary as a witch, the Governor waxed angry in his turn.

"It is time to put a stop to all this," he said indignantly. "They will
denounce me as a witch next." So he issued a general pardon and jail
delivery--alike to the ten persons who were then under sentence of
death, to those who had escaped from prison, and to the one hundred and
fifty lying in different jails, and the two hundred others who had been
denounced for prosecution.

It was a fair blow, delivered at the very front and forehead of the
cruel persecution and it did its good work, though it lost Sir William
his position--sending him back to England to answer the charges of his
enemies, and to die there soon afterwards in his forty-fifth year.

When Chief-Justice Stoughton, engaged in fresh trials against the
reputed witches, read the Governor's proclamation of Pardon, he was so
indignant that he left his seat on the bench, and could not be prevailed
upon to return to it.

Neither could he, to the day of his death, be brought to see that he had
done anything else than what was right in the whole matter.

Not so the jury--which, several years after, confessed its great
mistake, and publicly asked forgiveness. Nor Judge Sewall, who rose
openly in church, and confessed his fault, and afterward kept one of the
days of execution, with every returning year, sacred to repentance and
prayer--seeing no person from sunrise to nightfall, mourning in the
privacy of his own room the sin he had committed.

Mistress Ann Putnam and her husband both died within the seven years, as
Dulcibel in her moment of spiritual exaltation had predicted. Her
daughter Ann lived to make a public confession, asking pardon of those
whom she had (she said unintentionally) injured, and died at the age of
thirty-five--her grave being one that nobody wanted their loved ones to
lie next to.

As for the majority of the "afflicted circle," they fell as the years
went on into various evil ways--one authority describing them as
"abandoned to open and shameless vice."

Master Philip English, after the issue of the Governor's pardon,
returned to Salem. Seventeen years afterwards, he was still trying to
recover his property