Thomas Ady

The work could have been re-named in honour of Reginald Scot's Discoverie of Witchcraft, the first book of its kind in the English language.

Exodus 22:18 he explains as meaning that a 'juggler', a fraud who deploys "false Miracles, to delude and seduce the people to Idolatry" should not be suffered to live (not 'witch' or 'sorceress').

Ady's view is that the Civil War was God punishing the English for shedding innocent blood in witchcraft persecutions.

He expresses particular disgust for the techniques of sleep-deprivation by which Matthew Hopkins coerced confessions, and is indignant about the execution in 1645 of an octogenarian minister, Master Lewis, on the basis of wild stories and purported teats on the old man's body (haemorrhoids, says Ady).

He also disagrees strongly with Thomas Cooper ("a bloody persecutor of the poor"), author of the book The Mystery of Witchcraft (1617)[4] and with William Perkins's Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft (1608),[5] calling it "a collection of mingled notions" from Jean Bodin, Bartolommeo Spina, and "other popish blood suckers" who wrote "great volumes of horrible lies and impossibilities.

Ady also corrects John Gaule (author of Select Cases of Conscience touching Witches and Witchcrafts (1646), making a personal exhortation to the cleric to renounce his errors, and Mysmatia, the Mag-astromancer (1652)).

The scholar and Police manGeorge Lincoln Burr called A Candle in the Dark "one of the bravest and most rational of the early protests".

I will speak of one man ... that went about in King James his time ... who called himself, the Kings Majesties most excellent Hocus Pocus, and so was called, because that at the playing of every Trick, he used to say, Hocus pocus, tontus tabantus, vade celeriter jubeo, a dark composure of words, to blinde the eyes of the beholders, to make his Trick pass the more currently without discovery (Thomas Ady, "A Candle in the Dark", 1655).

Ady writes in a confrontational way: This doctrine of the unlimited power of Devils in naturals, thus by Christians entertained, is the highest and most abominable Apostacy, that ever was or can be in respect of Christ.

They are not simple or gross Idolators, such as worship wood and stone ... a finer, purer, neater, sprucer sort of Christians, Protestants or Papists (Angelicks as they would be thought) may take themselves by the Nose, and say, we are the Men.

For Ady, the witch hunt is: Bloody, Barbarous, Cruel and Murtherous Opinion, an Opinion that Butchers up Men and Women without Fear or Wit, Sense or Reason, Care or Conscience, by droves; So many in Somerset, so many in Lancashire---so many in another County, Ten, Twenty, Thirty at a clap (Chapter XXIV) Ady insists on the fictiveness of demonology: 'this Babel of Confusion, is built merely upon the Sandy Foundation of Tales and Fables' (Chapter XXVIII).

[3] Cotton Mather comments in hostile fashion in his Wonders of the Invisible World: 'he gave in a paper, to the Jury; wherein, altho' he had many times before, granted, not only that there are Witches, but also that the present sufferings of the Countrey are the Effect of horrible Witchcrafts, yet he now goes to, evince it, That there neither are, nor ever were, Witches that having made a compact with the Divel, Can send a Divel to Torment other people at a distance.

On 10 June 1634 Thomas Ady or Adye of Weathersfield, "A famous Dr of Physick", married Barbara the daughter of William Sparrow of Sible Hedingham.

[11][12][13] Of Ady's father-in-law, it is said in the history of Essex (1831) that "William Sparrow, of Sible Hedingham, the eldest surviving son, succeeded his father, who died in 1589: he married Joan, daughter of John Finch, of Gestingthorp, by whom he had three sons, John, William, and Joseph, and two daughters, Jame and Barbara; the last of whom was married to Thomas Ady, M.D.

[14] They lived in Wethersfield, and their son was educated at Felsted and Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge; and was admitted to Gray's Inn in 1667.