Note 50 — WITCHES, WITCHCRAFT, WIZARDS, &c.

This story must be accounted for some way or other; or belief in the appearance of the apparitions must be credited. Either the miller himself was the murderer, or he was privy to it, unperceived by the actual perpetrators; or he might be an accomplice before the fact, or at the time it was committed, but without having inflicted any of the wounds. The compunctious visitings of his troubled conscience, the dread of the law in the event of the disclosure, coming from any one but himself, doubtless made him resolve to disburthen his guilty mind; and pretended supernatural agency was the fittest channel that presented itself for the occasion. That Walker and Sharp never confessed any thing, ought not to be matter of wonder. There was no evidence against them but the miller’s apparition, which, they were well assured, would not be likely to appear against them; they were determined therefore not to implicate themselves; well knowing, that however the case stood, Graime the miller could not be convicted, because, in the event of his story of the apparition being rejected, they must be acquitted, although suspicion and the circumstances of the pregnancy, &c. were against them; and again, if the miller had declared himself, after this, as evidence for the crown, his testimony, if taken at all, would be received with the greatest caution and distrust; the result might, in fact, have been, that the strongest suspicions would have fallen upon him as the real murderer of Anne Clarke; for which, under every consideration of the case, he might not unjustly have been tried, condemned, and executed. The statement of Lumley proves nothing that was not generally known. That Anne Clarke was murdered was well known, but by whom nobody ever knew. She afterwards appeared to the miller; and why to the miller in preference to any one else, unless he had had the least hand in it? and with the exception of Sharp and Walker, the only living being who was thoroughly acquainted with the catastrophe, but who himself was, in fact, as guilty as either of the other two.

The Mr. Fanhair, who swore he saw “the likeness of a child standing upon Walker’s shoulders” during the trial, ought to have been freely blooded, cupped, purged, and dieted, for a month or two, until the vapours of his infantile imagination had learned to condense themselves within their proper focus: then, and then only, might his oath have been listened to. Besides, the child could only be a fœtus, at what period of gestation we are not told, and to have appeared in proper form, it ought to have had its principal appendage with it—the mother. The two, however, might have been two heavy for Walker’s shoulders: nevertheless, the gallantry of the times, certainly, would not have refused her a seat in the dock alongside her guilty paramour; or a chair in the witness’-box, if she came to appear as evidence against him.