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blood;’ and he begs for a trial in
Boston, or, at least,
for a change of magistrates.
His entreaties were vain, as also his prayers, after condemnation, for a respite.
Among the witnesses against Martha Carrier, the
mother saw her own children.
Her two sons refused to perjure themselves till they had been tied neck and heels so long that the blood was ready to gush from them.
The confession of her daughter, a child of seven years old, is still preserved.
The aged Jacobs was condemned, in part, by the evidence of Margaret Jacobs, his granddaughter.
‘Through the magistrates' threatenings and my own vile heart,’—thus she wrote to her father,—‘I have confessed things contrary to my conscience and knowledge.
But, oh!
the terrors of a wounded conscience who can bear?’
And she confessed the whole truth before the magistrates.
The magistrates refused their belief, and, confining her for trial, proceeded to hang her grandfather.
These five were condemned on the third, and hanged
on the nineteenth of August; pregnancy reprieved
Elizabeth Procter.
To hang a minister as a witch was a novelty; but
Burroughs denied absolutely that there was, or could be, such a thing as witchcraft, in the current sense.
This opinion wounded the self-love of the judges, for it made them the accusers and judicial murderers of the innocent.
On the ladder,
Burroughs cleared his innocence by an earnest speech, repeating the
Lord's prayer composedly and exactly, and with a fervency that astonished.
Tears flowed to the eyes of many; it seemed as if the spectators would rise up to hinder the execution.
Cotton
Mather, on horseback among the crowd, addressed the people, cavilling at the ordination of
Burroughs, as though he
