Another book with which Matthew Hopkins was almost certainly well acquainted was The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the countie of Lancaster. With the Arraignment and Triall of Nineteene notorious Witches, at the Assizes and Gaole deliverie, holden at the Castle of Lancaster, upon Munday, the seventeenth of August last, 1612. Before Sir James Altham, and Sir Edward Bromley. London, 1613. This was the work of Thomas Potts, a lawyer, who was very active in the affair.
There can be no doubt at all that Hopkins himself was a firm believer in witchcraft, and the particular infamy which has branded his name with more than ordinary turpitude does not lie in the fact that he prosecuted so large a number of trials and was so eager in his quest, but in the baseness and unscrupulousness of his motives, which made him no better than a common murderer, inasmuch as to fill his purse, to achieve power and a name, he used a black and damning crime, the guilt of which in those feverish days of terror and civil strife it was perilously easy to affix and peculiarly difficult to disprove. Men have always been apt and are still ready to charge their opponents, whether theological or political, with the vilest vices and the most unspeakable enormities. Probably this is because subconsciously they believe that an individual who can sin so grossly in one instance, the most vital point, must be guilty of the whole catalogue of crime, since the greater includes the less. Matthew Hopkins was not moved by any considerations such as this, which, however unfortunate, can at least be comprehended and understood. How far he was sincere in his first prosecution of the coven who met hard by his house at Manningtree may remain an open question,
27
