‘Dear child, keep this letter secret so that nobody sees it, or I shall be horribly tortured and the gaoler will lose his head, so strict is the rule against it. You may let Cousin Stamer read it quickly in private. He will keep it secret. Dear child, give this man a thaler. ‘I have taken some days to write this. Both my hands are lamed. I am in a sad state altogether. I entreat you by the last judgement, keep this letter secret, and pray for me after my death as for your martyred father ... but take care no one hears of this letter. Tell Anna Maria to pray for me too. You may take oath for me that I am no sorcerer, but a martyr. ‘Good-night, for your father, John Junius, will see you never more. 24th July, 1628.’ On the margin is written: ‘Dear child, six denounced me: the chancellor, his son, Neudecker, Zaner, Ursula Hoffmaister, and Elsa Hopffen, all falsely and on compulsion as they all confessed. They begged my pardon for God’s sake before they were executed. They said they knew nothing of me but what was good and loving. They were obliged to name me, as I should find out myself. I cannot have a priest, so take heed of what I have written, and keep this letter secret.’ The letter is still preserved, with its crippled handwriting, in the library at Bamberg. This case is beyond comment. It is like the trial of Faithful at Vanity Fair, but with rack and thumb-screw in place of a jury. Yet it is but a moderate sample of those outrages on justice and humanity called witch trials. Men rarely held out long, but, did space permit, we might tell stories of many heroic women who endured ten, twenty, even fifty repetitions of torture, till they died on the rack or in the dungeon rather than falsely accuse themselves or their neighbours.[314] For when once arrested, the victim had small hope of acquittal, and in the most favourable cases, when there was no external evidence, and no amount of torture could induce a ‘confession’, the accused was sent back friendless and crippled to her home, which she was forbidden to leave, having first sworn to have no more dealings with the devil, and to take no proceedings against her accusers. To acquit her would imply that an innocent person had been tortured, a thing naturally repugnant to the tender consciences of the inquisitors. Nor was the mania confined to any special class. Protestants vied with Catholics, and town councils with bishops in cruelty and injustice. At Nördlingen they had a special set of torture instruments which the Protestant town council lent to neighbouring district authorities, with the pious observation that ‘by these means, and more especially by the thumb-screw, God has often been graciously pleased to reveal the truth, if not at first, at any rate at the last’.[315]