By this time the old woman, partly through listening to the incessant repetition of the charges against her, and partly, perhaps, from a weak delight in the notoriety she had attained, had come to believe, or to think she believed, that she was really the witch everybody declared her to be--just as a young versifier is sometimes deluded into a conviction of his poetic genius through unwisely crediting the eulogies of an admiring circle of friends and relatives. On one occasion, she was forcibly conveyed into Mrs. Throgmorton's house when Joan was in one of her frequently-recurring fits, and ordered to exorcise the demon that was troubling the maid, with the formula: 'As I am a witch, and the causer of Lady Cromwell's death, I charge thee, fiend, to come out of her!' The poor creature did as she was told, and confessed, besides, that her husband and her daughter were her associates in witchcraft, and that all three had sold their souls to the devil. On this confession the whole family were arrested, and sent to Huntingdon Gaol. Soon afterwards they were tried before Mr. Justice Fenner, and put to the torture.
In her agony the old woman confessed anything that was required of her--she was a witch, she had bewitched the Throgmortons, she had caused the death of Lady Cromwell. Her husband and her daughter, stronger-minded, resolutely asserted their innocence. Ignorance, however, would not be denied its victims; all three were sentenced to be hanged, and to have their bodies burned. The daughter, who was young and comely, was regarded compassionately by many persons, and advised to gain at least a respite by pleading pregnancy. She indignantly refused to sacrifice her good name. They might falsely call her a witch, she exclaimed, but they should not be able to say that she had acknowledged herself to be a harlot. Her old mother, however, caught at the idea, and openly asserted that she was with child, the court breaking out into loud laughter, in which she fatuously joined. The three victims suffered on April 7, 1595.
Out of the confiscated property of the Samuels, Sir Samuel Cromwell, as lord of the manor, received a sum of £40, which he converted into an annual rent-charge of 40s. for the endowment of an annual sermon or lecture on the iniquity of witchcraft, to be delivered by a D.D. or B.D. of Queen's College, Cambridge. This strange memorial of a shameful and ignorant superstition was discontinued early in the eighteenth century.