insist upon the
widespread influence of that work. Let it be said, however, that Hobbes
was not only to set in motion new philosophies, but that he had been
tutor to Prince Charles[70] and was to become a figure in the reign of
that prince.[71] Hobbes's work was directed against superstition in many
forms, but we need only notice his statement about witchcraft, a
statement that did not by any means escape his contemporaries. "As for
Witches," he wrote, "I think not that their witchcraft is any reall
power; but yet that they are justly punished for the false beliefe they
have that they can do such mischief, joined with their purpose to do it
if they can."[72] Perhaps the great philosopher had in mind those
pretenders to diabolic arts who had suffered punishment, and was so
defending the community that had rid itself of a preying class. In any
case, while he defended the law, he put himself among the disbelievers
in witchcraft.

From these opinions of the great we may turn to mark the more trivial
indications of the shifting of opinion to be found in the pamphlet
literature. It goes without saying that the pamphlet-writers believed in
that whereof they spoke. It is not in their outspoken faith that we are
interested, but rather in their mention of those opponents at whose
numbers they marvelled, and whose incredulity they undertook to shake.
Nowhere better than in the prefaces of the pamphleteers can evidence be
found of the growing skepticism. The narrator of the Northampton cases
in 1612 avowed it his purpose in writing to convince the "many that
remaine yet in doubt whether there be any Witches or no."[73] That
ardent busybody, Mr. Potts, who reported the Lancaster cases of 1612,
very incidentally lets us know that the kinsfolk and friends of Jennet
Preston, who, it will be remembered, suffered at York, declared the
whole prosecution to be an act of malice.[74] The Yorkshire poet and
gentleman, Edward Fairfax, who made such an ado about the sickness of
his two daughters in 1622 and would have sent six creatures to the
gallows for it, was very frank in describing the opposition he met. The
accused women found supporters among the "best able and most
understanding."[75] There were, he thought, three kinds of people who
were doubters in these matters: those who attributed too much to natural
causes and who were content to call clear cases of bewitchment
convulsions, those who when witchcraft was broached talked about fair