Cottjens whistled for his dog. Like Ebenezer Slythe in London, he was a happy man; a little richer, a little older, and a little wiser. He would write to Sir Grenville with his news, his good news, that Mordecai Lopez was sick in Amsterdam, unable to interfere in Sir Grenville’s affairs.

Twenty-two

The day before Campion’s execution dawned gray and wet, rain slamming down from the west and beating the river into a surface of pewter-gray misery.

The bakers were worried. A fine day meant a fine profit. Even if it poured with rain there would still be a vast crowd on Tower Hill to watch the execution, but few of them would want to buy soggy pies. The bakers prayed for a break in the clouds, for God to send fine weather to London. By mid-morning it seemed their prayers were answered. A great hole was tearing itself in the western clouds, the first shafts of sunlight falling on Whitehall and Westminster, and the weather-wise proclaimed that the morrow would be a good July day.

There was still the small matter of the trial to be completed, but that had not stopped the bakeries working late for days before the execution. There was no doubt about the verdict, merely what sentence Sir John Henge, the judge, would pass down. Most of London favored hanging. The time had passed when witches were burned, and the city believed that Dorcas Scammell should be convicted of witchcraft and hanged, high and slowly above their heads. Others preferred a longer death, saying that her crimes were so heinous that a signal punishment was needed to deter others. They favored that she should be hung, drawn and quartered. It had the added advantage, as well as persuading other witches not to loose their familiars on armed men, that the victim would have to be stripped naked before her entrails were cut out and burned in front of her face. The body of a naked young girl would double the price that could be charged by those whose upper windows, fortuitously, overlooked Tower Hill. The builders of London, who customarily made small, laddered platforms from which spectators could watch executions, were similarly in favor of the severer punishment.

Yet others, mindful perhaps that the revolution was releasing strange ideas on England, preferred that she should be burned. If a man killed his wife the punishment was death by hanging, but if a wife murdered her husband, then the punishment was worse because the crime was worse. Women must be restrained, and there was a goodly body of London opinion that believed the sight of a burning, screaming woman would remind wives that the revolution did not encourage husband-murder.

Yet on one thing all were agreed. In church after church, in parishes a good half-day’s walk from London, the preachers roused the faithful in preparation for the great event. Perhaps never in living memory had so many Puritan preachers simultaneously taken the same words of scripture as their text: Exodus 22, verse 18, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” The Mercurius had done its work well. Faithful Unto Death Hervey was a hero to the city, the witch would die and already an enterprising publisher had put on sale a lurid and lengthy pamphlet that told the sorry tale of the witch Dorcas Scammell. Mothers subdued troublesome children by threatening them with Dorcas.