>From The Devil in Massachusetts by Marion L. Starkey Pg. 148 "...John Procter had been collecting evidence on how "free confessions" were being extracted from the men. His own eldest son, brought in later in the spring, had been chained heel to neck in the form of torture that had wrung "confessions" from the sons of Martha Carrier, a torture almost impossible to withstand. The chances were that the decent men appointed to preside over the trials were ignorant of this aspect of "confession." John Procter would instruct them, and his spirit unbowed by his prison experience, he looked forward to the trials as a fighter in training looks forward to the ring." Pgs. 192 - 196 "...It was wonderful how such men as John Procter and such women as Rebecca Nurse and her sisters managed to keep unshaken their hold on reality in the face of the impregnable if mad logic of the judges and afflicted girls, and how, firm in their knowledge of their innocence, in their faith in God, they would not belie themselves, even though lying was sometimes made so easy that a mere "Yes," whispered on cue, would be accepted as full and free confession.........Six more defendants were coming up for trial in early August, and most of these were in their several ways no less worthy of veneration than Rebecca herself. John Procter was one of the six and he came up fighting. There was nothing of the martyr's will-to-die in John Procter. In his fierce will-to-live he did not wait for the trial to make his voice heard, but two weeks earlier, on July 23, addressed to five ministers of Boston a petition in behalf of himself "and others." The substance of this petition was an appeal to the ministers to exert their influence to transfer the trials from Salem to Boston, or if that were not possible, at least to substitute other judges, the present incumbents "having condemned us already before our trials." The force of the petition lay in the detailed account, already described, of how "full and free confessions" were being wrung from the male suspects by torture. "These actions," concluded Procter, never one to mince words, "are very like the Papish cruelties." The last was an unthinkable phrase to apply to any enterprise conducted under Puritan auspices; it gave such affront that Procter's kinsmen in Lynn were immediately cried out on and arrested. The petition went to Moody and Willard, no doubt chosen because of their notorious sympathy with certain defendants; to James Allen, from whom the Nurses were buying their estate in Salem Village; to John Bailey, who had once been Willard's associate and was now Allen's; to the elder Mather. None of these took any decisive action on the petition. Those most sympathetic to its reasoning were in the poorest position to do anything; although Willard's courage had not abated, his influence had, thanks to his known deviation from the party line on witchcraft. Increase Mather's interest was awakened, but he too was at a low ebb of public influence because of the storm of criticism aroused by his championship of the new charter. Besides he had returned from England too late to observe the inception of the witchcraft and had since then been largely preoccupied by defending the charter and catching up with his backlog of duties as president of Harvard and senior pastor of the meetinghouse in the North End. He was in general content to follow the reasoning of his son Cotton, who had done so brilliant a piece of laboratory work on demonology at the time of the possession of the Goodwin children. Nevertheless Procter's thesis apparently did serve to focus attention anew on the prosecution. Soon after receiving the petition he called a conference of seven ministers in Cambridge to discuss not explicitly the question of confessions, but rather the perennially troublesome matter of spectral evidence. His proposition was "Whether the devil may not sometimes have permission to represent an innocent person as tormenting such as are under diabolic manifestation." This time there was unanimous agreement that it could happen, with, however, the reservation "that such things are rare and extraordinary especially when such matters come before Civil Judicature." After obtaining this decision Mather took the trouble to go to Salem to see for himself how the trials were conducted when they reopened in August. Here, however, his interest was less in the inconsequential Procter than in Burroughs, and the trial of the latter seemed fair to him. "Had I been one of the judges," he later wrote, "I could not have acquitted him." Even so, whether because of Procter's appeal or his own observation, questions continued to arise in his mind. At long last, far too late to help poor Procter, he did undertake a personal investigation of the methods under which confessions were being secured. It was thanks to him that Mary Tyler's account of the ordeal of the Andover witches was put on record. On August 5 and the days following the judges tried John and Elizabeth Procter, John Willard, old George Jacobs, Martha Carrier, and their most notorious captive, George Burroughs; and they condemned them all. Procter did not come unbefriended to court. Thirty-one friends in Ipswich and twenty-one neighbors in Salem Village had risked the sensitive responses of the afflicted girls by putting their names to petitions which attested to their faith in Procter's good conduct. "His breeding hath been among us," said the Ipswich petitioners in reinforcement of this statement, and added that he "was of religious parents in our place and by reason of relations...with our town hath had constant intercourse with us." ...Procter did, however, accomplish one thing. He had originally become involved in the prosecution through his attempt to save his wife Elizabeth. Well, he had saved her. She was pregnant, and these judges would not condemn to death an unborn child even though it was begotten by a wizard on the body of a witch. Elizabeth, condemned with the others, was given a stay of execution until the baby came, and Procter, who could hardly believe that insanity could reign so long as this in Massachusetts, from March into August, must have had faith that the light of reason would shine again before his wife's months were fulfilled."