Superstition and Witchcraft

When in the autumn of 1589 first one and then the rest of their daughters fell into strange fits and trances, Robert and Elizabeth Throckmorton, newly resident at Warboys in Huntingdonshire, at first refused to countenance witchcraft as an explanation. That the girls might be bewitched was the suggestion of the first physician they consulted; they got a second opinion. When this physician too was unable to explain the fits, a lengthy process was initiated which would end in the execution for witchcraft of John and Alice Samuel, and their daughter Agnes, in late December 1592. ¹ Lord of the manor Sir Henry Cromwell, recipient of the Samuels’ forfeited goods, used the money to institute a yearly sermon against witchcraft in Huntington. ² Two hundred years later the sermons were still being given; only now ‘the antiquated subject of Witchcraft’ was seen as part of ‘the gloomy gothic mansion of superstition’, maintained only by ‘the odious and mischievous powers of bigotry and ignorance’. ³