ogative.

On his accession to the throne of England in 1603, James came amongst a
people who had heard with admiration of his glorious deeds against the
witches. He himself left no part of his ancient prejudices behind him; and
his advent was the signal for the persecution to burst forth in England
with a fury equal to that in Scotland. It had languished a little during
the latter years of the reign of Elizabeth; but the very first parliament
of King James brought forward the subject. James was flattered by their
promptitude, and the act passed in 1604. On the second reading in the
House of Lords, the bill passed into a committee, in which were twelve
bishops. By it was enacted, "That if any person shall use, practise, or
exercise any conjuration of any wicked or evil spirit, or shall consult,
covenant with, or feed any such spirit, the first offence to be
imprisonment for a year, and standing in the pillory once a quarter; the
second offence to be death."

The minor punishment seems but rarely to have been inflicted. Every record
that has been preserved mentions that the witches were hanged and burned,
or burned, without the previous strangling, "alive and quick." During the
whole of James's reign, amid the civil wars of his successor, the sway of
the Long Parliament, the usurpation of Cromwell, and the reign of Charles
II., there was no abatement of the persecution. If at any time it raged
with less virulence, it was when Cromwell and the Independents were
masters. Dr. Zachary Grey, the editor of an edition of "Hudibras," informs
us, in a note to that work, that he himself perused a list of three
thousand witches who were executed in the time of the Long Parliament
alone. During the first eighty years of the seventeenth century, the
number executed has been estimated at five hundred annually, making the
frightful total of forty thousand. Some of these cases deserve to be
cited. The great majority resemble closely those already mentioned; but
two or three of them let in a new light upon the popular superstition.

Every one has heard of the "Lancashire witches," a phrase now used to
compliment the ladies of that county for their bewitching beauty; but it
is not every one who has heard the story in which it originated. A
villanous boy, named Robinson, was the chief actor in the tragedy. He
confessed many years afterwards that he had been suborned by his father
and other persons to give false evidence against the unhappy