Three women from Samlesbury, Lancashire, were acquitted of witchcraft in 1612 when 14-year-old Grace Sowerbutts changed her story during the trial to say she had been persuaded to denounce them as witches by Fr Christopher Southworth.
If convicted, the women would have been hanged with 10 others at the conclusion of the infamous Pendle witchhunt.
The trio – who included the girl’s aunt and grandmother – protested in court that Fr Southworth had plotted their judicial murder because they had left the Catholic faith to become Anglicans and avoid steep fines for recusancy, the crime of refusing to attend the new Protestant services.
Sowerbutts corroborated their story when she was later interrogated privately by William Leigh, a firebrand Puritan minister who also served as a magistrate.
In a book published last month called Something Wicked: The Lives, Crimes and Deaths of the Pendle Witches, author Carol Ann Lee suggests, however, that the official version of history handed down over generations by anti-Catholic polemicists is flawed.
She questions why Fr Southworth should be motivated to “go to such extreme lengths to invent evidence” before concluding that his alleged involvement not only “served the assize court well” but also the reputation of the judge, Sir Edward Bromley.
She said that an account of the trial, written by Thomas Potts, the clerk of the court, at the behest of the judge, “served as a useful chunk of anti-Catholic propaganda while simultaneously aiming to silence accusations that Bromley was a relentless persecutor of women and children”.
“No one, Potts believed, would now suggest that Bromley had failed to act impartially when faced with his first cases of witchcraft,” she writes.
“Bromley himself was no doubt satisfied that the case served a Protestant purpose and showed him to be a zealous investigator of the truth.”
On the same day that Bromley acquitted the three Samlesbury women he also convicted the Pendle witches – a group of men and women – and they were publicly hanged the next day at Lancaster Moor in a mass execution.
According to Potts’s account of the trial of the three, called The Wonderfvll Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster, the court had heard that Sowerbutts claimed she had seen Jennet Bierley, Ellen Bierly and Jane Southworth copulating with demons, killing and eating a baby and other occult practices.
Under cross examination, Sowerbutts admitted, however, that she had been “put to a Master to learn” about witchcraft.
The accused women shouted to the judge that her teacher was Fr Southworth, who they said was hiding in the area under the alias of Master Thompson.
Ms Lee observes that the accusations of Sowerbutts corresponded with established European folklore about the activities of witches which might have been plausibly conveyed to her by a priest who had trained on the continent.
She also notes, however, that two witnesses, John Singleton and William Alker, clearly perjured themselves with easily disprovable statements to shore up the claims made against Fr Southworth.
Following her admission, Judge Bromley pressed Sowerbutts to explain precisely how the priest had coached her to accuse the three women yet Potts recorded that “the wench had nothing to say”.
The judge adjourned the trial to allow Leigh, the author an anti-Catholic tract called Great Britain’s Great Deliverance from the Great Danger of Popish Powder, to question her privately with Edward Chisnall, another magistrate.
It was only after the interrogation that the teenager said emphatically that Fr Southworth had persuaded, counselled and advised her and retracted her accusations.
The three women were acquitted without an apology from the court and Sowerbutts was placed into Leigh’s custody.
Nothing is known about the fate of Fr Southworth but it was recorded that Jane Southworth, one of the accused, eventually left the area and remarried.
She was the illegitimate daughter of Sir Richard Sherburne of Stonyhurst who had married into the Southworth family.
She was not an heiress to the Southworth fortunes or to Samlesbury Hall, which throughout the 16th and 17th centuries had become a centre of illicit Catholic activity.
It contained at least two priest holes, one of which was built by St Nicholas Owen, who died on the rack in the Tower of London.
The Jesuit missionary St Edmund Campion stayed at the hall during his visit to Lancashire a year before his martyrdom in December 1581.
The Southworth family produced their own martyr when St John Southworth, a Lancastrian who ministered among poor Catholics in Westminster, was hanged, drawn and quartered in London in 1654, during the rule of Oliver Cromwell.
In 1970 St John, St Edmund and St Nicholas were canonised by Pope St Paul VI among the 40 martyrs of England and Wales.
St John’s quartered remains are kept in the Chapel of St George and the English Martyrs in Westminster Cathedral, while a section of rope which tied St Edmund to a hurdle as he was dragged to his execution at Tyburn is part of the collection at Stonyhurst College.